Very bothered by the extra length (that is extra longer in real time too) that interplanetary travels do now (in the past they were much faster in Pioneer) , as while browsing the Pioneer github i noticed this report talking about how much slower things can be now with the ship mass and whatever else :
https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/issues/5294I then did a quick comparison test with Frontier Elite 2 (as Pioneer is a clone of it) and did the following and posted the result on the pioneer community forum :
Frontier Elite 2 (dosbox version, not GLFrontier, set to 8000 cycles as recommended).
start on Mars
sell beam laser and missiles to buy an autopilot (the starter ship on Mars does not have one by default)
target Uranus
take off , fly high enough and change the engine to the autopilot.
max time acceleration
+/- 30 seconds later you're in Uranus orbit. It's fast and how it should be
Pioneer (latest official release from July)
start on Mars
(no need to sell anything as the starter ship has an autopilot)
target Uranus
take off , fly a bit higher, right click on the Uranus target and select "medium orbit"
(forced with CTRL) max time acceleration
+/- 2 minutes and 10/15 seconds ! later you're in Uranus. It's way too long.
and that is with the default setup, meaning no extra fuel, no extra cargo in which i imagine it would take even longer in real time then according to the github report
so much time doing nothing and just sitting and staring at the screen until the distance number finally get to 0 isn't anything approaching what is considered as fun.
And that is for the real playing time but i imagine it also impact a lot the ingame time (can't do a relevant ingame time comparison as ships in Frontier Elite 2 and Pioneer have rather different configurations)