All persons have thee right to be attracted to other objects in accordance with thee Laws ov Gravity

The title is a quote from the "Declaration ov thee Rights ov Human Beings" - and it seems to nicely fit this article.

Some background first: In Elite:Dangerous ships travelling in normal space have a top speed - which, according to physics as we know it, makes no sense.

Max speed relative to what one would have to ask? And, as long as my thrusters thrust, the ship should continue to accelarate. Thats how space travel works in the real world. From the viewpoint of game mechanics a maximum speed makes sense - relative to some defined reference: Without that any kind of space combat simulation would be extremely unsatisfying I guess. Ships just passing each other at extremely high speeds once and then most likely unable to catch up to each other ever again would not be the most rewarding gameplay.

So, we have a max-speed on our ship. That speed depends on the weight of the ship and the installed thrusters as far as I know. The maximum speed people seem to get out of an highly optimized ship is somewhere around 950m/s. Sure enough people start to challenge that limitation - and CMDR PrimetimeCasual found a way around it. With the help of a planet with high gravity and the right flight technique higher speeds can be reached.

And if something is capable of going really fast (as in hypersonic) it is only a small step to a racing event worked around that ability: Speedbowling was born. First I heard of that title I was hoping to see 10 other ships in a triangle and one pilot crashing into that group as hard as possible, but that's not what it is. Let me try to sum up the rules for the upcoming Speedbowl 3 event:

• Starting point is place of your choice that has to be 200km above the surface of the planet "61 Virgilis 2"
• Goal is to pass the groundstation "Margulis Depot" on that planet within 2000m distance
• It is not allowed to go above starting altitude while the race is on
• you must survive the flight not only to the finish line, but also until you have slowed down your ship to speed zero again. 
• Whoever is the fastest when passing the groundstation wins

The rules are in the announcement of the event, which can be found here.
A normal flight path for most participants looks somewhat like this (graphic by CMDR Alec Turner):

From other commanders, sending reports from their training runs, speeds up to something like 4100m/s seem to be doable in this setting. I have never tried this sport - so my goal should be to get as close to that as possible.

So first I checked out if I could rely on real world physics for optimizing my journey. Mgmt Summary: No.

Information about the planet from edsm.net

Free fall at 4.16g from 200km without any friction from an athmosphere - its easy to calculate the speed in which suddenly a lot of friction occurs due do hitting the ground.

So just free falling from that height we should reach 4040.3m/s ... remarkably close to what people reach in Speedbowling. Coincidence?

Turns out: The free fall model is also way off in regards to laws of physics applicable outside the game: I took my ship to 200km above the ground and turned all engines off. Ship accelerated quickly downwards, as one would expect on a >4g world... and at 500m/s just stopped accelerating. I just kept falling with constant speed. As there is no atmosphere on the planet, nothing should be stopping a continous acceleration, though.

When actually trying the "speedbowl technique" I also found out, that acceleration followed unusual patterns - it instantly goes from strongly accelerating to not at all when minimally changing the angle of the ship relative to the ground. Changing back also gives instant strong acceleration.

Also the direction of thrust and the direction of acceleration do not seem to fit - it should be the sum of the vectors of the thrust and the gravity, one would expect, but it does not seem to be that at all. I have no good means of measurement sadly, to prove this "feeling".

In summary it seems: Applying physics as we know it to the problem will not help much. This is sad, as I always liked the laws of physics somewhat. The simulation uses a different set of laws for calculating stuff. And these are not well researched yet.

So Speedbowling has to be done by feeling, not by thinking. I was hoping for a bit of advantage by understanding the mechanics behind the effect - to no success. I will have to train just like anybody else. Damn.

(after a few training flights I have actually managed to (a) survive (b) reach about 3200m/s and (c) miss the target by about 20km)