Obviously, the fix to that is another re-evaluating of ship speeds and try to get a even more accurate figure or what is actually needed, actually feasible and balanced in terms of what you consider.
Can we do it? *wince* I can hear SUBLIMEinal gritting his teeth together from here just at the thought of it
One highlight of things as they are now is that the big awesome speeds we have at our disposal are really traveling speeds. I don't expect you'll see many starships going around at 18 000c in a battle, mostly because it isn't done while keeping your weapon systems and military-grade shielding online. What's more, with the range and speed of most weapons, you're practically stuck using them at STL speed, in light-second ranges, anyhow.
Fred said:
In a referencial comparison, A light second is roughly 300 000 kps. 0.3c is roughly a third of that (100 000 kps). Here's a nice graph to portray scale:
Earth has a radius of 6000 km and a circumference of 40 000 km. The
Moon is something like 1.25 light second away from Earth. Earth is at a 1 AU distance from the sun and light from the sun takes 499 seconds to reach the Earth (499 light seconds) therefore, a ship going at 500c would cross the distance between the Sun and Earth in a second.
Jupiter has a radius of 70 000 km, 11 times the surface of Earth and 121 times the volume (big!) and the gas giant planet is about 5 AU away from the Sun, so it takes sunlight around 41 minutes to get there. If I had a ship traveling the distance between the Sun and Jupiter, going at 500c would cover the distance in 5 seconds; going at 2500c (our current power armor speed) does it in a second.
Pluto is 50 AU away from Earth and it would take 50 seconds to travel to it on a ship going at 500c, 10 seconds to get there going at 2500c and only 1.25 seconds going at our top speed of 20 000c.
The
Oort Cloud, the most distant element that might be considered as part of our solar system, is 50 000 AU away - roughly a light year - which is a quarter of the distance to the nearest star to ours; Proxima Centauri. That's a thousand times the distance to Pluto from the Sun so it'd take ~13h45m to reach it at 500c, ~2h45m to reach it at 2500c and ~20m to reach it at 20 000c.
The nearest star system to Sol,
Proxima Centauri, is 4 light years away. This means about a ~55h (slightly more than 2 days) trip at 500c, ~11h (less than half a day) at 2500c and ~82m30s (1h22m really) at 20 000c.
Following the above observations,
sublight engines already go entirely too fast to really give credibility to flying through asteroid fields or giving credence to maneuvering around planets at such speeds. Even with my previously given adjustment, the picture provided is silly, and that even at 0.1c (33 000 kps) really.
If
CDD-like FTL drive systems are mostly meant for inter-planetary navigation, those too are way too fast for credibility, though less blatantly so than STL engines. I could totally see fighters and power armors stick to higher STL fractions and do fine (because it really boggles my mind to see power armors going at 2500c). In fact, 2500c would be a fine CDD top speed, according to my referencing above.
Fold speed is a less problematic issue because we're dealing a lot more with transit times than any combat application speeds, but I wouldn't balk at it being divided by five to fifteen (because 20 000c to 60 000c seems like decent fold speeds to me and our current top fold speeds are 300 000c, I think).
* * *
But wait.
Readjustments of speed or not, however, this doesn't help the issue of being able to make 12c torpedoes compete with 2500c FTL drives, right? So, even if we'd 'fix' speed ratings as I just suggested above, it wouldn't really fix the problems... despite my prior argument that the 'nerfed' torpedo speeds were important to allow them to be seen and reacted to in ship battles.
SARP as GMed by others is more or less a similar model to what Wes effectively uses for a plotship. With Wes, right now, battles are made at sublight, using direct-fire weapons and projectiles - guided or not - that people see coming; with very limited uses of FTL (I'm thinking it's more like high fraction STL, honestly, after understanding the distances involved) to do special high-speed maneuvers.
Therefore, it's not really a speed issue so much as a reason why battles are carried out at sublight speed at all...
~ Firstly, it could merely be a issue of weapon ranges; there's no point zipping around if your weapons are only going to be useful at point-blank ranges.
~ Secondly, maybe to have main weapon batteries online along with shielding that ships can't afford to keep up FTL speed; so any ship intending to fight and defend itself is stuck going at STL speeds due to power demand.
~ Thirdly, going faster than your torpedoes and lazors is pretty lame. You'd just fly right into them.
~ Fourthly, it could be a sensor limitation. Maybe even quantum computers like MEGAMIs have their limits, despite the description Wes gave them.
~ Fifth, it could be an engine charge time limitation that prevents ships to joust at each other in superluminal jousting contests.
So, yeah, this would need to be, more or less, further detailed and ironed out... because as is, the interdiction fields
aren't doing the job well enough to confirm why a ship is committed to STL combat or not to make those weapons we use credible (because in general, if we follow Wes' medium for warfare we want to avoid clinical long-distance warfare and have more 'exciting' closer ranged battles).