What tools are planned to help pilots see below the ship to help land without having to resort to external views?
TL;DRRender-to-texture views of the outside are too expensive, so the more likely approach is a small representation of the ship's orientation by the landing pad, which only helps at authorized landing zones.
That is a bit outside of flight. I guess this is the leading question going towards, can we have render-to-texture MFDs to look outside our ship, which the graphics guys always get very nervous about. It's very expensive, because essentially it's rendering the world twice, unless you do a full screen view, at which point you might as well just be looking through.
It would be more doable to have some kind of small geometrical representation of the ship so that you can see its orientation. And then if we have the landing pad shown in front of you.
Yeah, we had this quite a while ago, and it's something that we need for specific landing zones. The automated landing had the representation of your ship, and you lined it up and you saw it come down. And that will definitely come back for that, but it won't help you with unauthorized landings.
So that feature essentially needs to be expanded.