IMHO trying to balance for "skimmer missions" ruined Horizons surface gameplay in general. Can't lock ground targets from a ship, SRV scanners can't lock on to a target with clear line of site. And of course skimmers that can knock out a frigate just because they collided.
Surface gameplay needs a serious and thoughtful balance pass.
The really, really odd thing here is: all the promotional materials, teasers etc. all hinted at exactly what we were doing: air-to-ground attacks with our ships (and if in a some of us would fly ships, some would drive SRVs, for a combined air and ground assault). Then when people started doing exactly that, attacking bases and such from the air (with weapons that appeared to be designed for the purpose, no less - e.g. rockets, plasma accelerators), it gets nerfed, targetting gets nerfed, ships now magically* sway when daring to point even slightly downward (even up in orbit!), skimmer have magical shield and thruster disablind tech that if it actually existed in the Elite universe, we'd long since have missiles or cannons firing the stuff at each other...
And it's not like anyone had a problem with being able to attack skimmers and bases from the air. Everyone was fine with it, we were having fun, and then FD saw it and decided we were doing it wrong, and pulled out the nerf bat. Le sigh.
It is frankly ridiculous that this is still a thing. Frontier, could you please stop trying to incentivise us to get out of our ships and into SRVs with nonsense and arcade mechanics and do it by creating things we might actually WANT to do in SRVs.
Fun fact: I used to be a lasers and multi-cannons, all gimballed type of player. I have relatively recently switched over to plasma accelerator heavy loadouts, and it is really fun. I would love to actually use the things as they are described in the game, but alas, that has been nerfed to oblivion. I know it is technically still possible, but between being unable to target stuff from the air and the ship computer getting drunk* the moment you look down, I am not going to put up with that .
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*I've read many a justification that the ship would sway because the retro thrusters were too weak, but that quite obviously cannot be true. Any ship's thrusters, from strong to weak, are main thrusters, retro thusters (gotta be able to break), upward thrusters, left/right/down thrusters. I have yet to experience a ship that cannot hold steady when hovering horizontally, even upside down, so it cannot be that once the more powerful retro thrusters come into play, it would suddenly have trouble staying afloat.
Plus, if it were a factor of weak thrusters, the ship wouldn't just sway:
it would lose altitude. But it doesn't. And if you look in the external camera, you see the various thrusters firing in a random pattern, causing the sway. It's absolutely clear that this is the ship computer doing this deliberately, for reasons that make no sense from an in-universe perspective as well as a gameplay perspective beyond the game designers wanting us railroaded into using the SRV where an air-to-ground bombing would absolutely be the best choice.
Plus plus, now there's NPC ships on planets, so there is nothing stopping them from just adding some defense ships (SLFs, Vipers, or even bigger stuff) to the bases if FD deem them too easy when attacked from the air.
