Please describe in visual language what you intend two fighters dogfighting to look like, in terms of positioning, maneuvering, etc.

So, this is a really big question. I think it means a lot to a lot of people because it's going to describe how we go ahead and talk about the new flight system and what the expectations are out of it.

I think the three different models that we... We'll probably talk about this lots over the hour, that there isn't just one thing and every ship or vehicle is going to do that one thing. There are sort of three different models or explanations, I guess. We'll call them three different combat styles, I think. And depending on the ship, depends on what they do. Some are designed for certain ones, others are designed for multiples, or some are just restricted to one.

It is worth pointing out that this is kind of a design challenge that is extremely difficult to try and balance, because it's obvious that, say, a six degrees of freedom alien ship fighting against a ship that can't fly sideways is obviously going to have a huge advantage, right? And this is the sort of thing that we have to balance.

Yeah, a lot of that balance goes beyond the flight model. It goes into what people call the gunnery and that sort of stuff. So the flight model is one layer of it and there are multiple layers on top of that or underneath it.

I think we can give a bit more detail on this, because there's more than just it varies between ships. It actually varies between environments as well, because I think the expectation is that the new atmospheric flight model is going to give us a lot more aerial combat like you would get in World War II planes. So you're going to have a lot of forward movement, an enormous amount of vertical turning acceleration. So there's practically no slide in vertical, especially in things like the Gladius and the Hornet. And you can't really strafe. If you try and strafe with, say, the Gladius, the drag on the back of the ship and the tail will actually pivot the ship back into the airflow. It wants you to fly straight. And the result is that atmospheric flight is going to feel like you're in turning battles, and you're going to be trying to get behind onto the six of other players, and that's how you're going to do the best. But in space, that's not the case, right? In the same ships. And I think for a lot of the human type ships, we're going with the more main-centric flight model. So less six degrees of freedom and lower maneuvering thrusters.

And a lot of our ships are visually built that way as well. We don't want to go, here's a ship with a huge main rear engine, it's going to be a great strafe fighter now. It's built into that character. A lot of them are main-centric, but then you do have those alien ships like the Scout. It's supposed to be the strafe master. It can strafe in any direction. That's its big selling point and its big plus point. The downside of that, because obviously against something that is main-centric that has a huge advantage, is it's relatively weakly gunned, has no missiles. Yes, you can outmaneuver them by doing all this movement that I'm doing here, but you have to use that to your advantage to land multiple successive hits onto stuff that cannot do that.

I think another concern that I've seen a lot in the community is that going with the heavily main-centric model is going to end up in just jousting fights, right? And that's definitely something that we don't want to be the major thing. We don't want this to be boring. We want it to be believable and realistic, but not boring. So we can do things like, we're not going to reduce the angular velocity such that it's more like World War II. But if you try and joust too much... This is sort of the more difficult thing that we're still kind of working on, is how to make this not so effective. So first of all, we can increase the maneuvering thrusters just to the very limit such that it's not the dominant method. I think probably you're going to have inexperienced pilots who come and just fly past, and they have a short window to do their combat, and then they're going to drift off, and it takes a lot longer to slow down in the new ships than it did previously. So you're going to carry on drifting past. And the hope is that we can balance that such that it's not boring and it's not just straight up jousting.

Yeah. And again, you've got such a small, tiny window to do stuff with our current weapons setup. There are people that only need that tiny amount of time on target to destroy other people, which is something, obviously, we want time to disable to be a thing and time to kill to be significantly longer than that. If you're just jousting, you're just going to be... and then half a minute later, you come back and it's going to take absolutely forever to do anything effectively. So yeah, there's always going to be people that joust, there's always going to be people that circle strafe, there's always people that are going to turret. Is that the most effective way to... Yeah, absolutely.