You may find a lot of information (and a nice controversial discussion btw) in in this topic .

Even more details on Freelancer Physics are here.

But both threads you have to read to end because some corrections to first posts are to be considered.

The short answer is, "read both my post and Dev's post, and get confused"

OK, here's a longer version. I need to go to bed soon, so I'll be relatively brief:

If you're working with regular FL ships, then you need to look at a lot of variables:

linear_drag (engine)
linear_drag (ship)
max_force (engine)
mass (ship only- do not count the mass of anything aside from the ship- cargo mass, etc., is not used by the FL game engine- don't let anybody tell you otherwise- I proved this with experiments you can download for yourselves)
steering_torque (ship)
angular_drag (ship)
rotation_inertia (ship)

Here are some good, Starflier-esque starting values:
ENGINE
linear_drag = 599
max_force = 48000

SHIP

mass = 100
linear_drag = 1

steering_torque = 17500, 17500, 17500
angular_drag = 10000, 10000, 10000
rotation_inertia = 1000, 1000, 1000


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What to change and why.


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Ship Top Speed, Acceleration and Real Turning Behavior (change of vector + change of position, not to be confused with spinning alone)

Lowering Mass without changing anything else will result in faster acceleration curves and faster real turning behavior. Raising Mass will make the ship accelerate more slowly, and will also mean that no matter how quickly it can spin, it will take longer for the ship to return to the point where it began to turn (that's why "real turning behavior" is an important concept, and vital if you want to do physics tweaks).

Raising Max_Thrust will result in a higher top speed. Lowering it will... you get it.

Raising the Linear_Drag of either the Engine (preferred for space mods) or the Ship (what I did in Warriors of the Sky, because engine-kill would've been ridiculously unrealistic) will result in lower maximum speed and faster linear acceleration and real turning behavior.

I repeated over and over again while writing Freelancer Physics 2.0 (which, btw, was written because 1.0 was full of holes after we did experiments and shot it to pieces- I dunno whether 1.0's still around, but it's wrong, wrong, wrong) that Linear_Drag is the most important constant in FL's physics system, which is very simple. I have not changed my mind about that- it's still the variable that has the biggest effect on how ships move around in the game. Raising it too high will result in ships piloted by the AI zipping around very unrealistically. Putting it too low results in the AI not being able to steer correctly, and the result is that it constantly runs into things

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Spinning Behavior (what most people think of when they think "turning", even though that's not accurate)

Lowering steering_torque will result in faster turning speed. Raising rotation_inertia will make turns speed up more slowly, and will make reversing the direction of a turn slow down, but will not affect the top speed of a turn. Do not change angular_drag- leave it as a constant, so that this relationship doesn't get confusing.

Edited by - Argh on 5/13/2005 1:17:45 AM

Thx guys, that explained everything I needed