Will damage states be different for when you are flying within atmosphere?
TL;DRDamage states probably won't differ in atmosphere beyond gravity and turbulence changing the physics, though atmosphere-specific effects could be done and a more physically accurate debris system is planned.
Have we really thought of that? Simple answer is no. What happens when you break off a wing, say, is we fire these squibs and it distorts the UV2s and creates an alpha channel, so you get kind of an uneven surface, and then we fire some special effects. That's the current state of the damage tech. That's not going to change in atmosphere, other than there will be gravity and turbulence. So the physics will change.
But different weapons do have different weapon effects when they hit. A bullet will tear through the metal a bit more than, say, a laser, which will burn through the paint but not actually tear through the metal. So maybe there's some kind of damage inflicted via atmosphere that has a different visual effect. I'm just saying that could be something that's done.
We're going to be working on a debris 2.0, and what that means is we're probably going to take more into account the torque of a percussive thing, like ammo hits at a certain vector and that'll start to shear off the wing, and it'll be more physically accurate, basically. Right now we give an impulse to the debris and it doesn't really matter where we shot it from. It just kind of always randomly sort of pops off in this cone that we established through our XML.