For ships with both vertical and horizontal flight mechanics (Khartu-al, Reliant), will these flight modes be manually activated or will each flight mode be for landing or flight exclusively?asked by Mortis Rigger
TL;DRChris Roberts says the Reliant can fly in both vertical and horizontal modes, the Khartu-Al mostly flies vertically and deploys to land, and finer manual control of flight modes should come later after the cockpit interaction refactor.
I would say right now, obviously the Khartu-Al, the flight mode is either you're vertical when you're flying, then you switch to the more horizontal landing mode. The Reliant itself has a sort of vertical and horizontal mode and I would say potentially those could not necessarily be limited to landing and flying. Not sure about our very first flight implementation of how we're going to do that. Because default is horizontal for landing and vertical for mostly flying.But the idea would be, there would be reasons to for instance be horizontal. Say if you went down and were flying close to a planet and you wanted more of an atmospheric model, you'd probably want to be horizontal. And we're definitely going to allow you a lot more interaction with your ship and control of the flight modes and ICFS as time goes on. We're kind of in the middle of what we call this big item refactor we've talked about, that has a whole use ability factor in terms of being able to switch on your HUD, turn off power, or switch off various systems you would have and look around and interact in the cockpit.So when most of that functionality is on it will allow us to to allow you to have more control some of the features of, whether it's your flight system, or other features of your ships. So that would probably be, you potentially could have two stages of something like the Reliant where one it's just vertical for flying and then horizontal when it lands. Then later on when all that deploys, and we've still got to upgrade all the interactions and cockpits, you'll be able to maybe have more precise control of: "Oh I'm in landing mode, i'm not in landing mode. Oh I'm in vertical mode or i'm in vertical flight mode or horizontal flight mode." But ultimately that is where we would be at. And the Reliant is actually is built to be able to fly in both modes. The Khartu-Al less so much, that's more about flies normally in the vertical mode and then deploys this way to land. So anyway hope that answers the questions for you.