Are you happy with the current flight model?
TL;DRThey are happier than a year ago but some areas remain unsatisfactory, and thruster efficiency curves, an aerodynamics rebalance and added jerk are hoped to make ships feel livelier, especially in atmosphere.
We're a lot happier than we were a year ago, that's for sure.
Bits and pieces are getting to where we want them to be, but there's other areas that are definitely not.
So one of the things that's obviously a well-known upcoming feature this year is the thruster efficiency curves. That's probably the most explored feature that we're working on at the moment, and part of that necessitates an aerodynamic rebalance of the ships, because that's one area that I think is suboptimal at the moment, the aerodynamics. It's pretty cool and it's pretty good, but especially when the thrusters are much weaker in atmosphere, the ship behaves differently than it has done before, because before the thrusters could overpower the aerodynamics, and now they're not so able to. And so we're working a lot on both how the aerodynamics is calculated, how the drag is calculated and worked out on ships and stuff. And that will hopefully improve that whole experience. And we're also adding jerk, which is the next derivative after acceleration. So that will make the ships a lot smoother and more dynamic feeling, maybe not quite as rigid in their movements. And that will be something we work on in the future. And hopefully those two together will really make the ships feel a little bit more, especially in atmosphere, and in space, a little bit more alive, a little bit more interesting motion.
Those two things are sort of what we're trying to get to: the end goal of what hover mode was trying to achieve in atmosphere, but doing it a different way.