Push, energy, physics, I don't know

Okay, I'm having trouble working some things out.

I built a booster which has six simultaneous touch push scripts that each push the toucher upwards at maximum impulse. When I tried this to start with it would reliably send me 2,000m or so in the air. Now, it sends me maybe 200m, or 400m, or 800m, or whatever it feels like apparently.

I have a readout script that gets an energy readout from each push script (I wasn't sure whether energy was per script, or by object, so I didn't take any chances) but energy always seems to be 1.

What's going on here? Are some of the push scripts not activating before I leave the ground and so falling foul of the inverse cube push law? I'm CONFUSED and I need HELP.

I can list the code here if it helps, or there's a full mod version at my home area.

I doubt it's energy that is the issue. Here's my guess: the physics energy will periodically check the speed of everything, and if it's faster than the max "allowed" (approx 50m/s), then it just caps off the speed at 50ish. It's possible that not all of your pushers are hitting in the same physics frame (and I bet they'll only get a one frame chance), it might be that the physics engine "notices" that you're going too fast after some non-fixed time.

Actually I'm more inclined to believe the former, but anything on the fringes of what the physics engine wants you to do will be unreliable.

Hmm. Well, there's not a lot I can do about any cap, but I'm inclined to think that "not all scripts acting in the same frame" is more likely to be the reason, since the height reached is so variable.

What sort of things could be done to have the scripts hitting within the same frame? Reduce overall lag? Cut out any extraneous processing in the push scripts (at the moment they have a touch_start and a link_message, the latter to feed back their energy when asked?)

It's the variability of result that annoys me - I get disturbed when things work differently each time they're run.