The only way to stop a ship without braking thrusters in order to fulfill a waypoint is to do it yourself in Direct Control mode. And DC isn't exactly newbie-friendly...
This is exceedingly annoying, especially if you've got a ship set up to follow several waypoints. The first one won't be completed ever, simply because the AI will keep overshooting, turning around, and overshooting again.
Yes, I know that any decent ship design will have at least a few reverse thrusters, however at the same time bad ships shouldn't be punished to the point where they literally won't complete waypoints at all. This will be an optional feature, where a toggle in the settings would determine if this would be the default move command behaviour or an alternate one, since I do agree that sometimes not slowing down at all is important, especially in combat.
I have two ideas for this, but I guess more could be proposed as well:
- When stopping, ships would whirl around completely and use their main drive to slow down to a speed where space drag could do the rest.
- The ship would rely entirely on drag to decelerate, and would turn off their forward thrust much earlier.