Since weight is a factor in flight behavior, will cargo ships with full cargo holds end up having planets where the gravity will or will not allow them to land or even fly in atmo?
TL;DRYes, flight is very reactive to mass, so heavy cargo will make ships sluggish or unable to take off depending on a body's gravity, though uneven cargo balance is only a hoped-for feature.
Absolutely. Yeah, that's one of the really cool things about the new flight model, is it's very reactive to mass. So you can add more mass and it feels more sluggish. Well, actually, currently you can't do this, but the hope is that you can put all of your cargo on one side of the ship and the ship will actually be unbalanced, and you'll actually feel that in the handling. That's a little bit more difficult to do because it's in a different physics grid, but we would like to do that.
Chris has mentioned that desire several times over the years.
I mean, just quickly touching on that before people have a heart attack. If you fill your ship so much with hugely heavy cargo, we almost certainly will have warned you before you do that, before you spend all of your money filling your ship up with lead to the point that you can't take off, and then no one's going to buy it back. That will be a choice you have made and ignored all of the warnings. If you happen to land and your buddies then fill your ship up with stuff for you, that's beyond our control. If they fill your ship with vehicles and tanks, then it can't take off.
And then, as more planetary bodies come online, as more moons come online, and they all have varying atmospheres and varying gravities, this loadout on this ship flew great on Crusader, but you take it to some other moon and you can barely move.
It's actually one of the great things about the current stuff. The moons, they all have very slightly different atmosphere and gravity, so it does impact... Daymar is almost like Earth atmosphere, I think, so it's akin to flying on Earth. It's a bit weaker than Earth. But Cellin, which has very little atmosphere and very little gravity, is this. So you have that atmospheric state and you have the space state, but then it does blend in between the two.
You'll even have the atmospheric handling change in the upper atmosphere. Dogfighting in the very high atmosphere is going to feel different to dogfighting right at the ground.
And again, you can use that to your advantage. So if you know you're weak fighting in space, but if you can get down to the planet surface...