high gravity and thrust control

[ChaosCloud]

I've recently watched ObsidianAnts video about landing and exploring a 9.77g planet and I think it shows very well two flaws in the current way the vertical thruster input is used by both, the player and the landing autopilot.

So the first issue is for us players which is that even the tiniest input possible for 'thrust down' results in ALL of the counter-gravity thrust being turned off.
This behaviour becomes already obvious on 1.5g worlds but on 9.77g it's already lethal: https://youtu.be/5_o216dG1Yc?t=4m25s
He just nudged the down thrust a little and PLONK.

This isn't neither useful nor realistic, so I'd propose instead a change of the input interpretion in the following way for the vertical thrust on planets:
Input of 0-25% 'down' does NOT cause the counter-gravity thrust to be outright cut off and instead would reduce it.
So for example 0% input for 'down' leave the counter thrust at 100% (100% as in how much is needed to not fall), 5% input would reduce the counter thrust to 80%, 12.5% to 50% and 25% input would cut off all counter thrust.

Input of 25-100% 'down' would be mapped to 0-100% 'down' thrust, so 50% 'down' input would result in 33% 'down' thrust as 50% is the 1/3 mark of that input range, and so on.
This way we could easily prevent smacking into the ground instead of thrust system thinking "I'm fighting 9g here but the captn want's to go down by a feather's weight, time for a break (literally)".

Though this range where the counter thrust is just reduced before actually being cut off probably needs to be scaled with the gravity as it could become weird on low gravity planets, so 0-25% for reducing the counter thrust should be the upper end for 2g and up or something like that, 1g get's 0-10% and 0.8g has like 0-5%, or something similar.


The other issue can be even more leathal as it's outside of our control because it's the recall landing's down thrusting before touchdown: https://youtu.be/5_o216dG1Yc?t=9m10s
I have no idea why it does that as it only makes sense on micro gravity planets where the landing gear often won't grab properly, but on 1g and up is it nonsense.
It totally does not care about the gravity and still does it's manual 'plonk' anyways, smacking off one ring of the shields there.
I've observed the same behaviour on a 1.9g world where it cut off all thrust for a short moment and then pushes down, but it still didn't smack down as hard as in his video.
This should not be done except on <1g planets since that's the only place where it might be actually needed.

 

[duckofdeath]

You have the option to use analogue vertical thrusters. The best way I've found to implement this for me is to have specific settings with landing gears deployed, as analogue vertical thrusters aren't necessarily particularly practical in regular flight.
The indestructible ship when the auto-pilot lands is probably there because Frontier knows the autopilot gets it wrong so often.

 

[ChaosCloud]

You have the option to use analogue vertical thrusters. The best way I've found to implement this for me is to have specific settings with landing gears deployed, as analogue vertical thrusters aren't necessarily particularly practical in regular flight.
The indestructible ship when the auto-pilot lands is probably there because Frontier knows the autopilot gets it wrong so often.

Yeah, if that would work then there'd be no issue.
I am using analog thrusters, got that mapped to the right stick, and even the minimum which is ~4m/s on low gravity worlds results in a rough PLONK on +1g. But obviously is it not that much of an issue there, it's more an inconvenience and to me an immersion killer because I'd like to think of flight controls in spaceships in 3302 being smarter than that, especially when they got the ability to overclock your vertical up thrusters to the point where they can seemingly counter any gravity at the cost of increased heat output (funnily enough, not increased fuel use).
It'd become an issue though on the high g worlds but I'm staying away from these for now, I've had more than one near death escape on these so far and I don't wanna push my luck further.

And what is this indestuctability you're talking about? I've heard someone mentioning that he took heat damage for unknown reasons during manual landing and that he lost additional hull to that when he recalled his ship, and Ant's ship lost still half a ring from the bump, he just didn't notice as it seems.

 

[duckofdeath]

I have no problems moving at 1m/s with the vertical thrusters on HD 148937 3. Make sure your calibration is correct. for instance, my x52 needs a full motion in both direction on the knobs on the throttle to get centred properly.
There are bugs with landings. Generally the ships never take damage. I've even heard of suggestions that recalling a ship with 99% hull can sometimes bring it back to 100% hull. Maybe because the game resets the hull status to compensate for its bad landings.