Yeah, neither speed-matching nor speed caps make any sense physically in space, unless one justifies speed cap and fast turns by some technology allowing ships to "grab onto the fabric of space", but I think Einstein gets restless in his resting place when we try to make speed non-relative. So, trying to make sense of speed matching, one should begin NOT with capping the resulting speed, but by capping acceleration, instead. But in any case, the original Privateer was obviously not intended as an educational software package to teach kids physics ...
... with ships not just having wings for the sake of atmospheric gliding, but actually flying through space as if they were in the atmosphere,
banking in order to turn faster !!! LOL!! From the point of view of fighting in space, Privateer is an arcade, not a simulation by any stretch. Sheldon slide would be the default in space. And, sure, you could match speed with anything slower than a photon, given enough fuel and the will. But acceleration to that speed could take a long time.
Solution:
Going to a true physics engine is not an option for the remake, as it would become too different from the original. And as it was stated earlier, the main reason for speed match was to allow you to follow the boxes from an exploded ship. So let me attack the implied premise here:
The assumption is that a ship explodes like it's made of pure gasoline, and that whatever it carries should acquire a high velocity as a result. Or that another ship might bump into a box and cause it to bounce at great speed.
I'll argue away the last point first: Bumpin with your ship into a food box would just obliterate the box itself and splatter its contents over the four quadrants. This would be the case even if the box and contents were actually a solid block of magic rubber. Try throwing a ball of any material at even 1 Km per sec into a wall, and you'll see it becoming a cloud of smoke, rather than bouncing.
As for the first premise: I don't know what kind of fuel these ships carry, but it's definitely not gasoline. Now, if the explosion they make when you kill them is from their fusion engines going critical, or from their anti-matter stores suddenly hitting the matter in the container, a nuclrear explosion, needless to say, would leave no neat boxes floating around, or any way to tell atoms coming from a box from those coming from the pilot's ass.
If the explosion is caused, instead, by weapons caches going off, well, there aren't so many weapons on these ships, I mean, they got all kinds of plasma and particle guns, but only 10 or 20 missiles. This could be enough to cause a pressure gradient in the ship that causes parts of the hull to fraction, pretty much as in the pretty effect. What would happen to the boxes in the cargo, in this case, is that they would kind of float around, rather than be projected away. Why? Because what gives parts of the hull a high velocity was the pressure gradient at the moment of the hull's ripping apart. But at that very moment, the pressure gradient on each individual box in the cargo room would be zero, as pressure rises fairly equally around each box.
And so the solution is: Let the boxes float around with roughly the same speed vector the exploding ship had, or even cheat and assume that the explosion slowed the ship down and let the contents drift at a fraction of the original ship's velocity. And let the boxes be obliterated on impact.
As for using speed matching against ships, like for escorting, etc., well, if we're going to have max speed, and the remake definitely has to have it, then make it stick, and don't let ships match speed with objects moving faster than the ship's max speed.
Makes no sense to me, but neither does a speed limit, so, there.
