Elite Dangerous: Managing your speed

The "Sweet Spot" for maneuvering

If you keep your speed in the blue zone, your ship will maneuver better.

No matter how many pips you divert to ENG (engines) there always is blue spot where you will have the best maneuvering speed. It's marked with blue bars left from your speed and this is the position where you should keep your throtle each time you are maneuvering, especially in dogfight.

More pips to ENG will increase top speed and your blue "sweet spot" maneuvering speed (because higher top speed means higher middle speed).

Your throttle bar displays your current speed regardless of direction and the blue zone only cares about speed, not direction. If you go sideways at 50% of your max speed you get the best turn rates then as well.

Engine Capacitor

Each ship has maximum speed and it's achieved by diverting 4 Pips to ENG (engines). Speed increase is linear so you will have top speed only at 4 pips to ENGines.

Boost

Boost gives you the best turn rate throughout it's duration.

Speed Limit

The speed limit isn't really for network reasons – supercruise multiplayer breaks that limit by orders of magnitude! That limitation is more a case of how fast things can accelerate compared to their top speed and average separation – 'tis not a simple piece of maths. Supercruise works in multiplayer because speed & accelerations are all still in roughly the same proportions.

In this case though, the limit is there for combat reasons: In general the faster ships go, the further apart they get – You'll travel further whenever you loop round to target, you cover more distance in he same reaction time, etc. If we make the ships go faster, people will be further away on average, which means harder shots (or more gimbals), and you see far less of the opposing ships in a dogfight which ruins the visuals & ability to read your opponent – We'd have to rely far more heavily on GUI for everything, which wasn't what we wanted.

My best guess is that far in the future space combat would take place at extreme speeds (maybe even up to meaningful fractions of C, I don't know) and you'd never see your opponent, just an AR highlight in your cockpit to tell you where they are. Hell, a huge amount of modern day air–combat is all beyond visual range!

Planetary landings

As for what we'll do with planetary landings (because yes, descending through a thick atmosphere at ~300m/s takes a while!) – I don't know yet, that's a design discussion for later I think. I have this mental image of some kind of atmospheric entry procedure where you may have limited control and increased speed until low altitude... but that's just a momentary brain–dump.