When we will get some little insight of development regarding procedural atmos planets in Elite?
This question keeps coming up every few weeks. The answer is "not anytime soon" by just about everyone.
I personally don't know the exact schedule but there are only two kinds of things we can land on right now:
1. Planets with no atmosphere
2. Moons with no atmosphere.
I'm sure they realize that there's two types of things:
1. Those mentioned above WITH an atmosphere.
2. Those mentioned above WITHOUT an atmosphere.
The problem: If you can land on things that HAVE an atmosphere, how do you determine which things? You can either land on all of them or none of them. If you can land on all of them, what do you do with ELW's and ammonia worlds? Can you say why you CAN'T land on either of those last two?
This is going to be tricky for them because it'll have to be introduced in some way that only certain planets get landed on. There's a lot of planets/moons that are potential gold mines of "things" (resources) but they have "a trace of atmosphere" so no landings.
Like you, I think that's such a shame. Lava worlds come to mind. I'd love to land on those, as would many of us, just for the danger of being on such a hot rock with the potential of being fried by the heat. If only that very, very thin atmosphere wasn't a problem.
The difference between ED and SC is that SC that ED is being released in pieces. Because of this, I'm patient. It'll happen eventually. SC is being worked on as a total package and as with painters (and other artists), it's never "done" until someone comes in and takes it away from the artist to be put on a wall somewhere. Every time SC gets more money, instead of using it to get the "finished" parts of the game released, they invent more nuts and bolts, then continue to work on those nuts and bolts. That's a nice idea but they just make more work for themselves. That's ok. I'm sure it'll be great once released but in the meantime I'll go with the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race philosophy.
I didn't mean for this to turn into a SC v ED post, either. Sorry.