This updated flight model: give us the lowdown on what it is, what it will entail and what you're doing right now.

So following the Master Modes release, we read the community feedback and so on. We had our own plans with this and basically decided what the next step should be. And there's three things, which are not just the flight model but the whole flight experience, right? So I mentioned before we've got the space flight model, which is how ships use the thrusters. We have the atmospheric flight model, which is the control surfaces, which we also demoed in the past but which got quite a big update now. And there is the quantum experience. So all of these things combined, they're moving the game towards the traversal vision that CR wants. Because the reason why we have Nav Mode at the moment, where you can go into this mode where you can reach 1,400 meters per second, is just there to navigate in these big spaces that we need to traverse, because we don't have the quantum code for that yet.

So in terms of the thrusters, thruster flying: this is not a groundbreaking "oh, we do everything else", it's just an evolution of the previous stuff. It's just building on what we already have. So the main thing for combat flyers out there is that we're going to have a non-spherical velocity space. This means we can go forward faster than we can go backwards or to the sides. This has the benefit that these typical six-degrees-of-freedom problems that we have in combat, like back strafing or kiting, are much, much reduced. From our perspective, this just feels better; the fights are closer and so on. Also we added jerk. So jerk is the change of acceleration. So instead of going within a frame from 0G to 9G, we're ramping this up now over a short amount of time, at least for the fighters. And this just makes sure that you have to plan a little bit more ahead, and the rotations feel smoother. What else is there? Oh yeah, and then we built in a lot of different steps for how to customize IFCS for you. So what you have in the game right now is more like an IFCS on training wheels, right? Where at the moment you can turn off a couple of assists like gravity compensation and G-safe. And these things in the future will actually always mean a little bit of a buff in terms of what your thrusters can do. So what you have at the moment in our internal builds: you can turn off gravity compensation, you can turn off the stability. So the stability, for example, changes the behavior of IFCS and gives your lateral thrust more importance than the longitudinal thrust, which means when you're in fights, it's easier for you to evade shots. But at the same time, it makes the flying a little bit more dangerous because it doesn't keep the TVI stable anymore. Well, that's more technical details.

I was looking at iCore102, who was like, "This doesn't sound like it's going to solve the problem when you're four minutes into a 20-minute exploration."

That's fine. Honestly, don't believe me. When it's available, play it and then you can judge it properly. The other thing, which is a pretty big chunk, or also makes a big difference, is that we don't have top speeds anymore. And now before you gasp, "Oh god, unrestricted speeds": no, there are still restricted speeds, but in the game data we don't have any top speeds anymore. The top speed of a ship is what your thrusters can achieve in a fixed amount of time that we define. But the good thing is when you have your power assignment and you put more pips into your engines, your thrusters will actually produce more thrust. And more thrust then means more speed.

It's not some artificial speed limit that the universe has applied to you.

Well, we need speed limits. We're a game after all, right? But this basically means, because it's based on physics, what will happen is: you have your Gladius and you fire a missile. The overall weight of the Gladius is reduced now. So your thrusters have the same thrust output, but your ship is now lighter. So you actually get more Gs. We had this before, but now you also get more speed based on this, right? And looking further ahead, this is outside of the new flight model, but when we have Maelstrom and so on, we're also going to have more realistic ship masses. At the moment, the Gladius weighs 55 tons. In Squadron it was up at 180 tons, which is close to a 747, right? But now the Squadron Gladius is around 20 tons, which means the weight of every missile and every component actually matters. So if you, for example, have your Gladius or any other ship and you just rip out the most important components, you will just get much, much faster.

This is going to be very relevant for smaller craft, maybe for racing as well. Having lighter components or removing weapons will give you that extra window of performance that you can exploit throughout the race.

That is basically just the space part of this. On the control surfaces, we have a fully licensed pilot on the control surfaces for now. That's Karim. He is working on the control surface support. What we already have ready is the unassisted aerodynamic flight, which means how the ship feels when you directly affect the deflection angles of the control surfaces. So you can glide. Your ship can be entirely off and shut off, and you still have control over your control surfaces, which means if you're getting distorted in atmosphere, you can actually glide down, you can flare and you can crash land your ship in a controlled crash landing. So for the core on/off thing which I just mentioned, we introduced a concept which is called the IFCS core. What you have right now in the game, where the ship is just constantly stabilizing, compensating for your rotation, means the core is on. So IFCS is actively working for you. But IFCS in the future can be slapped down or even turned off. And in this case, you have pure Newtonian flight, also on the rotation. And this also happens when you, for example, crash into something. For example, on the Gladius, let's say we know that the Gladius cannot go above, let's say, 20 Gs. Then we might have a limit in the IFCS code that says when that ship goes over 25 Gs, the core is slapped off for a couple of seconds and then it needs to reboot. So during this time, you still have control over your ship. You can still use the thrusters and so on, but it will not auto-stabilize. So it's more or less like flying in Kerbal Space Program. Which means you will tumble after every collision, and the ship will not recover as fast. And whether the core is on or off also plays a role in atmospheric flight, because in atmospheric flight when the core is on, we will have a fly-by-wire system that keeps the TVI stable, but when the core is off, you control the control surfaces directly. A lot, sorry.

That 20 and 25 thing: those were numbers off the top of his head to illustrate a point. Don't go and update the wiki saying it's only going to have a 20G tolerance.

These are just examples, right?