Thruster Change: Make overboost a player choice, improve dampeners.

BLUF: Give all thrusters the ability to work above 100% when shift is held, but with some kind of overheat mechanic that prevents continuous use.

Having seen a lot of the feedback regarding the super dampeners, and issues with it making the game feel a bit odd to play.

I think there is benefit to letting thrusters work over 100%, but the current automatic braking version isn't the right way to go about it.

Outline: We already have the ability to overboost our suit thruster to accelerate at higher rates. We do so by holding shift. Giving ships the same ability and applying it to the dampeners as well would improve the feel of the superdampeners, and give players more options in building, as well as choice, risk, and consequence when flying.

How would it work in more detail? Allow thrusters to operate at up to 125-150% thrust when shift is held, with 100% being the max value that the terminal override can be set to, and also the max value that doesn't cause thruster overheat. This would allow the player to choose to push their ship's acceleration in any direction and give them choice and consequence to doing so.

What is thruster overheat? I have two ideas for this:

• Either a new mechanic that when a thruster fully overheats it stops working until it has cooled off, or
• That when a thruster fully overheats it begins to do continuous damage to the block itself (and potentially neighbouring blocks) until it cools off.

The latter would be potentially something you could overcome with welder repair setups, but that might not be a bad thing.

What about the dampeners? Dampeners would always use the thruster overboost to increase the ship's deceleration by default. Also by default it would automatically stop using the overboost before the thrusters overheat. The player could hold shift during any dampening to force the thrusters to continue overboosting but again this would be a choice given to the player. They may decide that the risk to the thrusters outweighs the risk of not stopping in time.

I would also add a checkbox to the ship setup, either in a cockpit block or ideally on the grid menu itself, to not allow dampeners to use overboost. This would mean that dampeners would only use 100% thrust unless the player held shift down.