Quote Originally Posted by holywhippet View Post
A few catgirls may fall by the wayside if I say this
To which I say: Good! Let them die! Let them all die! *maniacal laughter*

but that makes no real sense at all. Surely the orb would provide acceleration/force rather than speed. Otherwise whenever it started/stopped it would always jump to a certain speed rather than accelerate/decelerate. Letting go of the orb should just make the ship stop accelerating rather than slamming to a halt.
That's pretty much what I figured myself; it seemed weird to have a sequence of basically "you let up on the gas pedal too fast, and now your car judders to a halt in the middle of the freeway, shattering under the strain of deceleration".

It's especially bad in space, since there's not much to decelerate against.