X4 Foundations: Ludicrous Speed - Flying at Over 70,000 km/h.

Ever wondered what it would be like to fly at over 60 times the speed of sound in air? Well X4 lets you do this! The ship used is the Pegasus Vanguard available from PAR. I think it has the fastest travel speed of all ships, especially S/M sized. ARG S Travel Engine Mk3 are used since Argon engines have the fastest travel mode speed of all engines. The chassis is modified with an exceptional mass reduction mod but only the drag reduction aspect matters for speed. Engines are modified with exceptional forward thrust mods, rolling both for forward thrust and travel mode thrust. Despite there being an exceptional mod dedicated for travel mode, that results in a lower maximum speed as it focuses on improving other aspects of travel mode rather than speed alone. None of this requires DLC and this build has existed and been a favourite of mine since X4 released. Putting all these aspects together allowed the ship to reach a maximum travel mode speed of 20,783 m/s. The mods were rolled for the best travel speed result over a period of nearly an hour. With more luck or patients it may be possible to obtain more perfect mods that could allow the ship to reach in excess of 21,500 m/s. Seeing how rarely I saw results passing 20,000 luck was probably not on my side... At this speed taking the highway ring is slower than travel mode, so I perform a clockwise lap of the circle to demonstrate how ludicrously fast the ship is. Holding down boost allows one to enter travel mode at over 5,000 m/s which saves time reaching top speed. Ludicrous speed go! I also recommend reducing or disabling Head Movement Intensity in Game Settings to make turning at these speeds easier. The 2 hard parts of the lap are Unholy Retribution and Pontifex's Claim as they require sharp bends with little to no time for correction. Pontifex's Claim is especially problematic as the required moves might eject one into Holy Vision in an out-of-control way. Inevitably this happens to me and I splat into a station (3:15). Fortunately collision damage was patched shortly after X4 was released so that at worst a ship loses all its shield. Originally at release such mistakes were very fatal making flying at these speeds impractically risky! I demonstrate a more practical use of such speed by trivially exploring a sector as hundreds of kilometres burn up in seconds. Despite the speed the ship is surprisingly responsive with one being able to do a 180 degree turn back to maximum speed in only a couple of seconds. Time to return back to the start point (5:30). At this speed collision detection becomes a bit iffy as it appears possible to phase through some asteroids. I suspect if the collision volume is small enough it might fit between position samples. Enemies will not be able to attack you at these speeds since even the longest ranged weapons get out of range in under a second. Upon entry into Trinity Sanctum III I intentionally put the ship into an uncontrollable orbiting spin (6:45). This is done by enabling flight assist while still turning. The angular velocity is maintained and when combined with the extreme acceleration from travel mode results in the ship starting to orbit. As flight assist tries to reduce the spin the orbit radius increases. One can manually end the spin at any time by disabling flight assist and stopping the ship rotating before enabling flight assist again. Eventually I hit the super highway which carried me to the final destination. So slow compared with travel mode! The developers did a very good job at giving the ship a sense of speed. Not only do more and faster particles become visible from the window but the ship also shakes and groans more as it turns. That said the acceleration is not very realistic as in situations like doing a 180 degree turn the pilot would subjected to forces in excess of 2,000G which would likely have a similar result as crashing into a concrete wall at very high speeds. The speed reached is well past atmospheric re-entry levels and could nearly fly around the circumference of Earth twice every hour.