Can we expect to see a separate VTOL mode, without landing gear, with the new flight experience? People want to hover around without being forced to lower their landing gear all the time.
TL;DRYes, VTOL mode is being split onto its own control so ships can hover in atmosphere without lowering landing gear, and atmosphere-dependent fan thrusters will also be added for some ships.
Absolutely. The reason why this actually came up, I thought, was really interesting. Some of the really big ships that have low accelerations, well, I'm thinking of the Javelin, but that's not in game. The Idris is actually also an example of this. It's so heavy and its accelerations are so low that it cannot hold itself up if it's not in VTOL mode, literally at all; it will fall. So the need became apparent: what if we actually have VTOL on a different control, so that you can go into VTOL mode when you're entering atmosphere, not necessarily landing mode? And then the Idris can hover. And without it, you can't. And so that's going to go across all the ships that have VTOL modes. Cutlass. There's loads of them, actually.
Specifically saying VTOL doesn't specifically mean engines that rotate and do crazy obvious things. There are ships that have built-in VTOL thrusters in the underside, like the Starfarer actually has some big underbelly VTOL thrusters. Visually they look like giant maneuvering thrusters. So if you hear a ship saying, oh, it has VTOL mode now, we've not done some secret rework to add big spinning thrusters left, right and center to everything.
There's another thing that I think is useful to bring up here, which is the Constellation fans. And the Aurora fans. So we're going to make those work as well. And they're kind of a unique case. They're a special kind of thruster because they depend on atmospheric density. So we're making a new type of thruster, which we've never had before, which is a thruster based on the atmosphere, which are those fans. And so they will thrust in atmosphere when there is enough air. And as you go higher and higher in the atmosphere, they will actually become weaker and weaker, which is really cool. So those will work in the Aurora and the Constellation. The Starliner, I think, has...
Yeah, the Starliner has those big fans in the wings.