Back to search

Can ships with wings glide in atmosphere now?

TL;DRWinged ships can glide in a very basic way in 3.10, without real control, and control surfaces and shaped wings that maneuver the craft are planned for future releases.

Richard TowlerVehicle Experience Product Owner

Yes. But with a caveat, I'd say we've got a very basic form of gliding right now, where we've currently got the ships with a flat surface, so the wings are not shaped like wings, for example. At the moment, the ships have flat surfaces which generate lift and drag depending on how you pitch and move the ship, basically. So if you do turn off the engines, you will glide, but you won't really have control over the ship. But again, this is the first version of the atmospheric flight for these ships, and it's a really big step we've taken, but it's a step to enable us to do other things in the future. So in the future, we're looking at having control surfaces and different shaped wings so we can actually maneuver the craft with the wings rather than the thrusters. Because at the moment, we've got wings, but the ship is still controlled by the thrusters. So you've got the wings giving lift and drag and you force the ship over and then you pull back. And then you get a force in the corner, which allows you to pull the high G with the wings. But that is driven by the thrusters maneuvering that behavior, whereas we want that behavior to be generated by the aerodynamics itself. But again, that's a step in future releases. It's quite a complex job to add control surfaces, especially to make it visually look correct as well with all the ships. But again, for 3.10, it's the first step. And we're going to get a lot of feedback. And then we can iterate on that. And then we can put that into future releases with control surfaces and make the ships even more different than they are now.

Star Citizen Live›Targets, Turrets & Take-Offs·
Published on this date.3 Jul 2020
EpisodeFlight modelShips