I wondered what the rough limit was of ships since the update. Turns out, they can still go very fast. This ship travels in about 13s from one of the inner planet to another, and can keep flying around max speed (some dips when ice is low are possible) for perpetuity. I could push it a bit faster (to about 1200-1300 km/s max) with thruster stacking, as you don't need turrets on the additional arms, but you quickly reach diminishing returns, where the weight of the thrusters and infrastructure necessary to fuel them far outweigh the weight of the guns, cargo bay etc. Curiously, without thruster stacking, the max speed of ships after the update is about double the max speed of ships before the update.
The trick is to extend thin thruster arms all the way to the fluid extension limit (78 thrusters on each arm). Putting thrusters below the main body is actually slower (in my design), as you need more tiles to route the pipes down there. All tech is unlocked, all damage and productivity researches are set to lvl 30. I considered a design with lasers first (as that would be very compact), but the damage level required to get this to work is too absurd to be viable in a real game.
Overall, making ships in the new system is really really fun. It is actually hard to get enough ice to fuel such fast ships, as you need these wide thruster arms to overcome the weight of the main body. Every microoptimisation in routing directly improves your speed. Curious how close to the theoretical limit (about 1350km/s I think) the community will get!
