How does the atmospheric flight model currently affect the way hoverbikes perform?

Well, the thing that's really holding it up is I'm fixing a lot of things: IFCS itself, the atmospheric flight model, Gravlev. I have to have all that done before any of it can be checked in. So I actually have made significant progress on the atmospheric model. I talked in a recent ATV about where I wanted to go with that. And the main thing was I wanted the control system to actually utilize drag and gravity as part of its control, as opposed to the initial implementation, which was just that it would compensate for those things. And then its control system was essentially the same as it is in space. The compensation gets you to the point where it's basically zero drag and zero gravity, and then the control system is similar to space, except then you have less thrust available because those things are being used for compensation.

So at this point, you have that, right? So if you're pushing into drag, of course, you have less thrust available for accelerating forward because you're expending a lot of that thrust just to overcome drag. But the part that was missing was that when you start to slow down, it's actually using the drag that's pushing against the vehicle as part of your slowing-down force, as opposed to nullifying that out and then using thrusters to slow you down. So now when you turn and you bank into a turn, you'll feel a much stronger stopping motion on that slide than if you were just doing a straight yawing turn and not bringing as much of the surface area of your ship into the drag. And of course when you're falling, you're going to have a lot more acceleration to drop down because gravity is helping you. And as you're going back up, it's going to work against you. And so all that variability that you expect from atmosphere is going to come into play. And that's all in there now and seems to be working very well.