Are you currently happy with the current flight model, or are we still changing, tweaking and adjusting it?

We're still changing. We're still tweaking. So the thruster efficiency thing is obviously a pretty large change for atmospheric flight. And it will result in a lot of the atmospheric balancing changing. Because obviously, if the thruster forces change in atmosphere, that means the drag values have to change as well. So we're going to rebalance the ships for atmospheric flight. And then we are going to rebalance the ships for spaceflight combat as well. We're just taking a little bit of time to solve some design problems with combat where we're not 100% sure how we're going to proceed. But once we're more confident about that, we will rebalance the accelerations as well, and the drag for atmosphere. We're also going to do stuff like, we have the ability now to control the drag in different directions to a greater degree, so we can encourage the ship to fly in certain directions in atmosphere by tweaking, say, the drag on the right side for a ship that's asymmetric, for example. Then you're going to have more drag in one direction than the other and stuff.

So yeah, there's more tweaking to do. I wouldn't say there's some huge fundamental...

No.

Not like the change that we did with 3.5. There's nothing at that level planned.

No, it's mostly balancing and potentially some smaller mechanics changes to encourage certain types of combat.

Yeah. We want to get the combat closer, rather than being pixel shooters and people fighting at above SCM speeds, but we want to keep the maneuverability that we have at the moment. So you can dodge and maneuver and have positional combat, but at a shorter range, at slower speeds. And that's layered. That's not just IFCS or flight changes, that's changes to weapons, that's changes to perhaps shields and hit points on the hulls, and eventually that'll be physical, or just changes to how your ships behave at higher speeds to disincentivize you from trying to fight at those speeds, but using systemic methods to do that.

Part of the issue that we have at the moment is that it's balanced such that you end up at quite high speeds, such that you can't really change your velocity vector very quickly, and you end up circling around each other. And if the ships are forced to fly at slower speeds, that becomes less of an issue, because you end up closer and you end up able to change your velocity vector quicker, and so you get more movement in those fights and less drifting around each other.

We seem to be in a continuously changing sense where we're trying to find this right mix between wanting to give ships the speed and capabilities that they should have, while still wanting that close-quarters combat that I think we're all interested in. You want to be able to see the ships. You want them close enough that you can see the character and the personality of a ship in combat. It's an interesting challenge. We're definitely not there yet.

It's an extremely hard problem, because it ultimately amounts to having realistic physics but not hard sci-fi realistic space combat. And so we're in that balancing act of finding that right middle point between realism and the combat that we want.

Well, Chris has always said, we'll take it to the point of realism and then we'll bring it back to the point of fun.

And like you say, over the years we've tried different things. Some have worked, some have not worked. And I think we're getting much closer to where we want it to be, but there's still that last hurdle to overcome. Because in those previous examples when we've done things like that, the community always splits down the middle into: I love this, I hate this. The previous patch was better. No, this is great. And some of the benefits of this development style are that we can try these big changes. And then 'oh, the previous patch was better' moves one patch along as new people come in. It's an interesting challenge, and I think what we're going to be doing will help that.