Posted by: CheaterEater
« on: June 17, 2012, 10:52:34 AM »IIRC, going at below your max speed reduces your thermal signature, so it makes you harder to detect that way. I'm not sure how useful that actually is, though.
I had forgotten about that, it is an advantage of going slow. It reduces the distance at which you can be detected and is very useful for keeping small but fast scout ships from giving away their position too quickly to passive sensors. I like to scout a system by getting a sensor ship to jump in and wait a bit to see if anything is out there. Then I move away slowly to avoid giving away the position of the jump point before turning on active sensors and broadcasting my position to the world. I still have a high top speed to flee if need be.