The past few weeks I've been playing around with the flight models and the warp drive. It's rewarding to see all the different ships interacting with each other. Battleships need a good 10 seconds to accelerate into a turn whilst frigates swarm around them.
Initially I wasn't planning to include warp but the sheer size of even our local space made it a necessity. Like in EVE Online your forward speed needs to exceed 3/4 of your max speed for warp to be available. For the moment warp speed is set at 1/10th the speed of light by default, and whilst in EVE Online you need a special jamming ship to inhibit warp movement, for the moment the plan is for any ship to be forced to drop out of warp the minute it is picked up by an enemy ship's radar. Radar range spans from 1 km to 250 km. This is because space is so much larger than in EVE Online that I need to discourage people from simply circumnavigating enemy fleets. It also means that even a Shuttle can have a useful effect on an enemy capital ship.
I tested the warp drive by taking a trip to the moon in an Amarr Shuttle. It's to scale and orbits at an altitude of 384,000 km like the real thing.
More screenshots in the gallery.
There will be fleet jumping in the finished release, correct? With the realistic size and scale I'd imagine it'd be hard to locate your allies by simply jumping manually.