Proposal Discussion Seemless planet atmosphere entry & landing

[Tankshell]

Hi all.

As we are all aware, scheduled for development in the 1st major expansion pack is seemless planet atmosphere entry and landing.

Has there been any discussion on how Frontier intend to overcome the real world time it would take to actually travel down to the surface of a 1:1 scale planet and land?

At the moment we have Super Cruise which lets us travel vast distances in a short amount of time, whilst in open space away from large gravitational bodies, but in its current form this does not allow us to approach close to the planets themselves.

Logically this only leaves is with the ability to use our normal ship maximum thrust speed to actually approach the planet from that point onwards, surely this will take a VERY long time to actually reach the planet, and then to descend down through the atmosphere and eventually land somewhere?

In previous Elite games, this was compensated for by allowing for time acceleration/fast forward mode. Obviously this is not possible in ED due to its multiplayer nature (and the immersion breaking aspect of accelerating time).

Any ideas?

 

[FoxTwo]

Planetary landings and walking about (exiting your ship in your pilot body) are planned after release, very likely as expansion packs.

Thus I'm pretty sure they'll work out the details of time taken and all that to actually do a re-entry into planetary atmosphere

 

[Tinman]

Hi all.

As we are all aware, scheduled for development in the 1st major expansion pack is seemless planet atmosphere entry and landing.

Has there been any discussion on how Frontier intend to overcome the real world time it would take to actually travel down to the surface of a 1:1 scale planet and land?

At the moment we have Super Cruise which lets us travel vast distances in a short amount of time, whilst in open space away from large gravitational bodies, but in its current form this does not allow us to approach close to the planets themselves.

Logically this only leaves is with the ability to use our normal ship maximum thrust speed to actually approach the planet from that point onwards, surely this will take a VERY long time to actually reach the planet, and then to descend down through the atmosphere and eventually land somewhere?

No, logically they will just allow us to get closer to the planet while still in supercruise.

The minimum distance to celestial objects will probably be lowered even in the first release of the game as the amount of detail of the planets/moons/stars goes up.

BTW, I just made a thread about my recent travel down to the surface of a planet --> http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=31090

 

[forger]

Devs already answered this question - they are ONLY and fully working now on initial release and only DB knows how he wants expansions to make landing in his head but they did not discuss any further expansions yet.

i think this discussion is pointless as there is nothing to discuss, let's wait for full release and then DD forum can start working on that matter after there are some actual thoughts from devs.

 

[natte hond]

think it unlikely it will be seamless.
it will probably be the same as approaching a space station from SC.
where as the connection time is influenced by the connection of the instance host.
this has been improved allot , but seamless no.

as we probably get allot of different atmospheres , so diverse the entrances should be.
that would mean allot of work for FD.
or some procedural smart routine that takes the variable's into account.
this would be best I think ,it would mean never the same entrance.
ow great cant wait...