David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Eventually, yes. This is not a thing that's going to be in 3.4, though. Not in the initial release. We would like them to do that. In terms of the atmospheric flight, you actually can do that now. If you, say, turn off a lot of your MAVs, but just have enough that you can rotate the ship, you can actually just fly straight on the ground and then get enough lift to lift off. That is already the case in the new flight model. But the problem is we don't have any runways, and places like Daymar have pretty rough terrain.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Trying to get the environment guys to clean a lovely straight patch out of their beautifully crafted environments...

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So we've talked about this before, because we don't want to be in a situation where there's some ships that are so useless that they have to have a runway, in which case we need to go and add runways to all the landing outposts in the world, which is just unfeasible. So yes, you should be able to do that, but a lot of the ships, especially the smaller ships, also have the ability to do VTOL, just because it's so impractical to have runways everywhere.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And whilst you were talking about that, it reminded me of this video we didn't show at CitizenCon that a lot of people came up to me afterwards asking about, which was landing and takeoff. We had a video that we showed internally of you using the thrust magnitude, just having it hovering off the deck like 20 meters, and then just scrolling it down to the point where the thrusters no longer had the capacity to keep it up in the air. So it gently settled down, and then scrolling it back up to move it pretty nicely up and down, rather than just the current sort of coming down, coming down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

I just want to know if I can use an M50 for a ground race. It's got wheels and a really big engine on the back.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

You're going to have to resist it taking off, though. It's going to want to fly.