Tue May 17, 2005 5:08 pm by Argh
Uhm... I wrote a piece about that... it's called "a fascinating discovery about cruise" or something like that. Basically, you can play around with engines that eat more Power than the the Powerplant puts out while using Cruise. Then you can set Cruise to very high speeds, but players only get that top speed for a very short time period- afterwards, they're back to a lower speed that's described as a proportion of the power consumed vs. the power produced, per second * top Cruise.
It's quite possible to make this work, but:
1. I doubt if it'd work well in MP. People have reported that Cruise over 500 or so causes mad lag for some reason.
2. It'd require very clever thinking about energy-using weapons, because you'd no longer be able to "simply" balance their ROF, range, damage, etc. with the Powerplants and arrive at roughly balanced performance levels.
IOW, it's a neato idea, but it'd take a very clever game designer to make it work correctly- if you just built it as a "wow, we can do this" mod, it'd probably suck, because it'd ruin a lot of FL's game balance along the way.