Ships with combatStyle="chase" seem to be immune to Newton’s laws of motion, capable of such feats as changing which direction they’re moving without thrusting, and often without even bothering to turn to face in that direction first. Just to be certain I wasn’t getting skewed results, I tested this on ships with non-recoil weapons against ships with non-momentum weapons.

the_shrike 27 Apr 2015:

I think this uses the same set of code that escorts do, with similar results...they're also pretty prone to this stuff.

the_shrike 26 Jun 2019:

This becomes incredibly obvious in 1.9 if you blind a ship using the Chase style. Sometimes they end up accelerating to chase targets...backwards.