First human feedback: "ship movement feels sluggish". It was, and the cause was a bug rather
than a taste call.
`disc.damping` is applied every step AFTER accel, so the real cap on lateral speed was never
`maxSpeed` — it was accel/damping. At 78/6.5 that is 12 u/s in theory and a MEASURED 10.16,
which means the authored maxSpeed of 13 was unreachable and had been decorative since round 1.
A full tube crossing took 1.95 s. Against 12-20 u/s of forward flow that is 30+ units of canal
travelled while you cross the lumen once — so anything read late simply cannot be answered,
which is exactly what sluggish feels like from the cockpit.
accel 78 -> 155 (maxSpeed is now the ACTUAL cap: 155/6.5 = 23.8 > 19)
maxSpeed 13 -> 19 (crossing 1.95s -> 1.10s, 1.77x faster; ramp to top speed 0.12s)
damping 6.5 unchanged — it is what makes the ship STOP crisply, and precision was never
the complaint. Only the ceiling moved.
Knock-ons handled rather than left to rot:
- bank.gain 0.055 -> 0.04, so 19 u/s lands exactly at bank.max: full deflection still means
full roll and everything below it stays proportional. At the old gain the ship would have
been pinned at max roll almost permanently.
- arena thrust/maxSpeed 44/11 -> 90/16. Those were sized against the old disc; leaving them
would have made every room feel like treacle next to the corridor leading into it. Still
deliberately under the tube's flow, per the GDD's "slower, spatial".
Verified no tunnelling at the new speed: pinned at 19 u/s straight into the wall, the ship
reaches rho 10.51 against a wallRho of 11.38 and stays there — 0.32 u of travel per frame at
60 fps, well inside what collideWall resolves.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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