Capital ships in atmosphere: WTF? [Ships like the Polaris or Idris standing on their tails while hovering in atmosphere.] Any hope?
TL;DRNobody wants capital ships standing vertically in atmosphere, and the plan is to fix it with the new flight model by greatly lowering thruster efficiency, so large or heavily loaded ships may be unable to take off.
Okay, so I know what you want to say. So the vertical thing, right, where ships do this: nobody wants that, right? CR doesn't want that. He had a talk with me last week, right? But this is also something we probably will only fix with the new flight model. I don't want to say, "Oh, it's going to be fine in the future," but it is the plan for this, right? So right now, when you're in atmosphere, we have something called thruster efficiency curves, and the efficiency of your thrusters goes down by about 50% in the highest case. In the future, that efficiency will be much, much lower. So what you can expect, if you have a ship, let's say, give me a ship with VTOLs, I don't know, Cutlass, right? So if you have the Cutlass, the Cutlass is a light transport, so it will not be as punishing, probably. But let's say, does the Idris have VTOLs?
Yes, but they don't work currently in game, but they will do.
Okay, fine. So let's say the Idris has landed. Then you will get a message on the heads-up display that tells you what your thrust-to-weight ratio against gravity is. And if that ratio is below one, you will not be able to take off. And this is then just taking into account the mass of the ship and how much is loaded on it. So if you have your cargo full of lead cubes, let's say, then it is possible that you will not be able to take off.
It's possible, not a guarantee. You can overload.
You can overload, and then you will not be able to take off. I mean, you may try to boost, because boost gives you, vertically, I think something like 35% more thrust. You can put more power into your engines so you get this natural resource-network-based buff in your engines. You will have a hard time just hovering like this. And at the same time, these are your strongest thrusters, but your retros are usually a lot weaker than the other thrusters. So if you do this, you will eventually just sink down. That's at least the plan. So you can expect that larger ships will be harder to fly and to land in atmosphere. We will try to give players helpers so that new players don't just crash land this thing. But still, there's still physics. And the reason why the ships can hover at the moment is because they have so much thrust that they can. Because all they need to do is be able to hover in 1G, or let's say on Earth, right? When that is not guaranteed anymore, then you automatically have a more realistic and harder situation there.