Chris Roberts · Game Director, Star Citizen and Squadron 42

So it is part of the plan. So the atmospheric flight modeling, where we will model drag and lift and wind forces. And part of the previous version of IFCS was it kind of lived in its own little world and wasn't as integrated with physics as I'd like. So the newer version is much more integrated and utilizing the physics, so we can make sure that things like the wind that we would have on a planet that would blow the trees around would also affect your ship as you're moving around. And we're doing some other stuff, like our cloth; we've got a whole new cloth that we're working on that we may show you in the future, perhaps at CitizenCon. Again, the big drive is to unify the systems and try to make them scalable. So the simulation in atmosphere right now isn't as realistic as it could be, because it doesn't model some of the things that I just mentioned. Again, the thrust amounts are too high. So we kind of want to have ships where, if you're flying an aerodynamic ship, you'll get a benefit from the lift that you'll get from the aerodynamic ship. Or if you don't have that, you need pretty strong VTOLs to keep you up. But the days of ships having six G's of acceleration in any particular direction are something that I want to put in the past. And I want more of a distinction. So the Xi'an ships, which are really built in such a way that maybe they can strafe, are a great strafing ship, but something like, for instance, the Hornet should be flown a bit more like a traditional, kind of, yeah, the Star Wars style that you would think. So I want that distinction that you fly different ships in different styles, and depending on how you like to fly, you would pick your ship. Because right now I feel like they all do more or less the same thing, other than their size, and you go, "Okay, I'm in a bigger ship, it's going to do something slower." But I want this ship to go, "Well, this ship is much better at rolling and pitching. So instead of yawing, I'm going to roll and pitch, because I can achieve my goal faster than if I yawed." And some ships may be better at yawing and some ships may be better at strafing. So we want more distinct personality in the ships. And I think that's good for the game, because we have a lot of ships, and I really want people to have a ship that fits how they like to fly and what their personality is.