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I'd never played around with scaling ship designs so I decided to test this. I see what you're talking about. Braking scales with the ship size (doesn't change noticeably) but yaw, pitch, and roll do change pretty significantly. I assume lateral and vertical movement scale the same as braking, but I didn't test it. So basically turning and rolling ability decreases but thrusting along x,y,z stays mostly the same. I also noticed that "w" scaling has some pretty weird effects. I tested with a roughly spherical ship and it scaled fine. But then I added two big cargo bays to the sides and the more I scaled it down the more it started to look like a football.

I don't believe it's true that thrusters are different. Everything I've seen suggests thrust scales in proportion to volume and the mass of the ship is inconsequential. I've only tested this with braking thrust, but it holds true in that case. Multiply braking deceleration (game calls it braking thrust) by the mass of the ship to get the actual force of the thrusters. You can add or subtract mass from the ship, but that number should always stay the same. In theory anyway. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

True. But it might as well not exist, because no one is willing to waste a slot on that.

I tend to do most of my steering through asteroid fields using thrusters now. It just seems to work better that way. But I also play with full collision damage, so I tend to be extra careful around them. But when it came to engagements, on the old system I was constantly overshooting enemy ships and then struggling turn around without shooting off in the wrong direction. Now it's a lot easier to control the distance between yourself and the enemy. But if it's not your thing, then it's not your thing.

The problem is that, currently, there is little incentive to build ships with superior profiles or ships that can somehow exploit speed and/or positioning in combat, because those values are rendered moot by mostly linear scaling of everything and turret accuracy. So yeah, in that sense, moar HP and moar DPS is really all it boils down to. I just don't think the problem really stems from shield implementation. You may be right, but I do think some changes to shield mechanics could be used to encourage the use of smaller ships. One thought I've had is to tweak the balance so that shields are only practical on smaller ships and armor is only practical on larger ships. Somewhere in the middle you'd have a ship that would benefit from moderate amounts of both, and that would be the workhorse of the galaxy. This could be done by changing a given shield block from having a certain hp pool to having a certain generated shield volume instead. The hp pool is determined by the difference between the volume of the ship and the volume of the shield. This way, for any given shield block, a smaller ship is going to benefit more than a larger ship. In addition, you fix the scaling problem by making the energy consumption grow exponentially in relation to shield block size, so that it's virtually impossible to shield ships beyond a certain volume. This isn't meant to completely nerf large ships, so to compensate, you give armor significant hp buffs based on thickness, and also penalties for very thin armor. You also introduce point defense turrets and have the number scale linearly with ship size so that large ships have a fighting chance against close range attacks. I'm sure there are plenty problems with this idea, but one major bonus I see in it is that it significantly raises the cost of running larger ships since they will require minor rapairs to their hull armor far more often. I also think there's a certain sense in the idea that a system that converts energy into protection is particularly suited to ships that need speed and agility, while using mass for protection (armor) would be the main defense of ships that can most afford to sacrifice in those areas.

The question is, how does that comparison fare when you add shield scaling into the mix.

The way the game presents the numbers is a little confusing. Thrust appears to be affected by mass only because what the game calls thrust is actually acceleration. I'm not really sure how maximum velocity is calculated. I think the additional thrust would be pretty miniscule if you did that. Personally, I think engine thrust was increased way too much in the latest beta. I think my ship went from 80m/s2 to 300m/s2. That's pretty crazy. A 1Mt+ ship going from zero to max speed in 5 seconds just makes no sense to me. It seems counterintuitive, but it kind of has to be that way. Otherwise you rotate your ship and suddenly you're breaking the laws of physics. I'd kind of like to see ship specific speed limits removed altogether and replaced by a much higher universal speed limit. Acceleration is enough of a limiting factor. But I suppose the forum would be flooded with complaints from people not being able to steer battleships at 5000m/s.

That's going to cause problems on multiplayer. Imagine you're minding your own business and someone warps in with an insanely powerful ship. Next thing you know you're getting smashed to pieces by equally insane pirates and aliens.

Well, I think I found the problem. If cannons cause too much recoil, don't use them. And if you can't be bothered to steer around asteroids, then you're just going to have to live with poor handling. That's not a problem with game mechanics.

If bigger turrets cost more turret control points, this ceases to be a problem. This can also be balanced if the negative aspects to weapons also scale. Someone can try to put a huge cannon on a fighter, but it won't seem so clever when the recoil sends them tumbling. The same goes for energy consumption.

I agree with you that the way turrets work currently is kind of absurd, and that it would be better to have them as an element of ship construction rather than these things that magically pop off ships and we get to swap out on the fly. But I worry that the system you're describing would just end up overwhelming the average player. It reminds me a little of the way weapons work in Aurora4x which sounds really cool in theory, but for most people winds up being more of a headache than anything else. I do think a somewhat simplified take on this would work. You could have all of the basic turret types scalable and buildable with resources. Their base stats could be directly proportional to their scale. The drawbacks, such as mass, energy consumption, and recoil would also be proportional to scale. Each turret could have upgrade slots that work the same as the current ship upgrade slots. This would also mean that instead of popping off ships, weapons would be disabled if they sustain enough damage. You could have a few basic type of turret housings, some with more armor and less arc, and others vice versa.

I also don't mind thrusters being weaker. I think it adds an element of strategy in ship construction that's generally lacking at this point. But I really dislike the surface area biased thrust distribution formula in the Beta. It forces people to build them in certain shapes and sizes to achieve specific results for no particularly good reason. Purely volume based monodirectional thrusters would be far less confusing and would give people a lot more aesthetic freedom.

Koonschi confirmed that a retrograde marker is coming in the next stable build.

True. Though, you would get diminishing returns doing that as the layers got thinner. At some point you might even start to lose thrust. You'd be better off just leaving an empty space between each layer. Which kind of underlines the difficulty with making thruster obstruction work. The calculation would have to be based on all of the mass between the face of the thruster and the outer edge of the ship, whether actually contacting the thruster or not. It does seem like going with purely volume based thrust is a much simpler solution. I do get that. But the average ship's need for lateral thrust is so much lower than the need for braking power that it really isn't much of a sacrifice.

I agree with your position on stacking, but unfortunately allowing thrusters to work while obstructed means it will still be a thing. I've been playing around with thrusters on the beta and the new formula doesn't seem to achieve the intended results. A cube of thrusters split into two layers now receives a 50% bonus in thrust. A cube split into 4 layers gets a 100% bonus, 10 layers 150% and so on. The new formula would work fine if thrusters could not function while obstructed, but as long as they can, awarding bonuses based on shape guarantees that layering will continue to be an exploit. The only ways I can see of making this work is to either make thrusters purely volume based, or to change your position on obstructing them. Or perhaps as a compromise make it so that obstructed thrusters continue to function unless they are obstructed by another thruster.