Couple of notes:
1. Underlying simulation cannot, repeat cannot, in any fashion have a more realistic set of movement. That's just way too expensive per ship for something very common. In TLF or Starward Rogue or another smaller game: sure. In AI War, it's a major drag on the CPU. Calculation time is more than linear with a lot of the trig functions, meaning that the difference between 40,000 ships in AI War moving around and 1,000 ships moving around in some other game is more than "just" 40x more weighty.
2. Regarding accelerations being different, that's a data question honestly. We set it the way we did because it tends to annoy people otherwise. But now that things are in xml, that can be tuned and tested and we'll see what people think.
3. In terms of the visual illusion of realism, on the other hand, that's something that I am HUGELY in favor of and have already planned to spend a lot of time on. Things like ships in swarms doing graceful curves and whatnot, curving in together, etc, are all in my plans. The idea of the appearance of slow acceleration in the visual side that then catches up with the sim's reality over a bit of a lerp is a great idea, and would fit well with the lerping model we're dealing with in general.
4. The benefit of all of these things in #3 is that they don't have to be sim-consistent between machines, so we can use proper floating point math rather than less-precise fixed-int math, AND so we only have to simulate what is actually on your screen and at a scale that you can perceive the differences. And if the load is overly heavy from other things (giant fight, whatever), having an option that lets the game scale these bits back would also be possible.
