Version 2.1.21

[enterisys]

I like thruster change.
My prom ship gained 10% speed, while cargo ships lost 20% (easily fixed by rebuild).
If thruster stacking is an exploit that is so hard to prevent for building maybe implement a thruster diminishing return - say you know width of ship, if there are more thrusters present than can fit in this width - apply diminishing return to those extra ones or don't count them at all?

[TheGreatMM]

I registered specifically for this thread. That said, I’ve already got 800 hours in the game, so it’s about time anyway.

Anyway, my main Aquilo cargo ship is way too slow—I don't want to fly between planets with it. 50 km/h or so. I think I'll build a planetary travel ship now .

[Falling_Sands]

Many of my sub-optimal ship designs are now faster then before! Old speed cap (for non-thruster stacked ships) was ~500km/s which we can now surpass w/out thruster stacking.

As someone who has built many ships, both optimal and non, The old speed equation created a very narrow optimal build pattern. Thrusters needed to be placed with zero space in-between in either a \ or / with one tile of width dedicated to piping in the fuel/oxidizer. Any time you wanted to very thrusters height for aesthetic or other reasons, you were slowing down you ship, or when placing anything that extended beyond the thrusters to either side. We need more time to become familiar with the new system, and the optimal build pattern may emerge to be very narrow again (this is natural) but at the very least the decupling of width from the speed equation frees up more creative builds that very from the optimal / zero space line of thrusters on the back of the ship to be a little more competitive. I see this change as a big win for creating a more interesting build space. Negative backlash is natural given many previously optimal ships have slowed significantly. My own optimal hauler took a huge speed cut, but I'm more then willing to take the temp setback in order to enjoy a more varied meta.

10-08-2026, 09-21-48.png (3.9 MiB) Viewed 328 times

[FaultBat]

I'm extremely pleased by the drag change - I've never built fully optimized space platforms (in fact, mine are usually very bad), but being based on the displayed weight makes a lot more intuitive sense and allows for more variance in design.

I never really understood why it was based on width, particularly since the friday facts leading up to Space Age always said that the entire purpose of platform weight was to create a speed tradeoff on more massive platforms.

There may be further things to be said about how frictionless inertia does not behave the same way as an object experiencing rolling resistance and atmospheric drag, but I think the goal in a game like Factorio is to be intuitive and easily calculable, not to be a realistic simulation of space travel and orbital mechanics.

[Sheridan]

I personally really like that the developers brought common sense into the game. In real space, there's no atmospheric drag—only mass matters. So I applaud the removal of width-dependency from ship speed calculations.
Yes, ships are slower now, but the logic is rock-solid: there's no air in space, so there can be no aerodynamic drag and therefore no dependency on ship width. This change aligns perfectly with basic orbital mechanics.
Moreover, building platforms has now become a genuine engineering challenge: design a ship as compact as possible while maximizing the use of available space. And Factorio is exactly the kind of game that thrives on engineering challenges like this.
I want to thank the developers for this patch and ask: please keep the speed formula based solely on weight. It makes intuitive sense, opens up creative design possibilities beyond the old "pencil ship" meta, and fits perfectly with the logistical optimization philosophy of Space Age.
The slower speeds are a fair trade-off for a more realistic and engaging design space. If some ships need to be faster, players can optimize their logistics to reduce weight or add more thrusters—that's the whole point of the challenge.