How can ships hover over the surface of a planet in any orientation even when some of them are designed to use VTOL thrusters?

So we've talked about this quite a few times, but the maneuvering thrusters on ships are more powerful than we want them to be, for various reasons. It sort of falls out of the tuning process that we have at the moment, in that when you want a specific performance, it just dictates the maneuvering thruster capability. So they're all too high. So that's partly the reason why they do that. But also the VFX for when you're in atmosphere, they're the same VFX on the thrusters you have in space. So in space where it's all dark and you've got a black background, you can see these thrusters firing away, keeping you up. Whereas in atmosphere where you're in bright daylight, you sort of lose them against the ship. So it does seem like they're hovering, but in fact, if you look at them closely, the thrusters are on full tilt, trying to keep you up. So we've got plans to sort the maneuvering thrusters out, which will help that. Some ships do behave, like the Retaliator and Reclaimer, as people found out, especially when the Reclaimer came in, that you had to orientate yourself correctly coming in and out of atmosphere because you would just plummet down. And that's the sort of thing we're going for with those bigger ships, which if they have VTOL thrusters, you're going to need them on planets or moons with gravity.

And I'm going to recommend that folks check out Reverse the Verse Live from, I think it was about two weeks ago by the time this airs, maybe three weeks ago. It had Chris Roberts on it. One of the first questions right out the gate is, what is your vision for combat flight and atmospheric flight and stuff like that? And one of the things he talks about leads directly to this, wanting to redefine how ships perform not just in space but in atmosphere, and for ships to have their own character and personality in the way that they handle. So it's not just, we have 120-some-odd ships currently in the pipeline at various points, and you don't want them all to just be like skin swaps on the same ship.

They're all going to have character.

So I highly recommend you check that out if you haven't, because that's going to give you a lot more information than just this, because Chris has a lot more time to talk about it than we do today.