Regarding flight physics on planets: things like VTOL mode sort of lose meaning when you can just hover upside down or with the nose pointing at the ground. It does make flying easy, especially for things like the Prospector, but it breaks immersion. Are there any plans to force ships to stay close to horizontal at slow speeds? This would also affect ground combat and make it more necessary, as you wouldn't just be able to point straight down at targets.
TL;DRRichard says the team plans to move to control surfaces so aerodynamics drive atmospheric maneuvering, making hovering harder and giving VTOL ships an advantage, but control surfaces and their controls must be worked out first.
Yes. So at the moment we have aero surfaces on these ships, but it doesn't fly like a plane. So they're still driven by the thrusters, but we do change them based on the planet they're on, so they do lose some power in atmosphere. But the thrusters, to generate the performance in space, have to be set at certain strengths. They have to generate the accelerations that we require in space. And then when we fly in atmosphere, you lose some efficiency, but we still need the strength in the thrusters to be able to push the ship through the air. And actually pushing aero surfaces through the air takes a lot of strength. So we are limited: to get the maneuverability in atmosphere currently, we still need quite strong thrusters, which means you can hover quite easily. But that's not always going to be the case. So in the future, we are going to move towards control surfaces. And this is going to allow us to move the movement of the ship from thrusters to aerodynamics. So it's going to be the aerodynamics driving the maneuverability of the ship in atmosphere, and the thrusters are just going to help a little bit. They're going to help move the ship and allow the thruster layouts to do their work, but it's not going to be the primary source. So if you're flying a Gladius, for example, and you go really slow, it's just not going to have the power to keep it up. And that's where the VTOL ships are going to come in, where they can transform and fly in VTOL and hover. And that's where they'll have the advantage. But we need to add control surfaces first and work out how we do all the controls with that as well, because it's quite a complex problem to solve without going full flight simulator, for example.