Official SE5 release date announced - September 12

[Raapys]

It is simply that the turns are one millisecond long, with non-instant weapons and turning.

And the fact that all ships carry out their actions/orders at the same time, as opposed to "real" turn-based combat where you do one ship then the other.

[Suicide Junkie]

Raapys said:
And the fact that all ships carry out their actions/orders at the same time, as opposed to "real" turn-based combat where you do one ship then the other.

It only seems that way because the turns are so short.
In reality the CPU can only deal with one ship at a time, and time steps have to be quantized in a finite computer.

You might say that even real life is turn based, with each turn being one planck time (5.4 x 10^-44 seconds) long. And that system works quite well