Why atmospheric landings?

[Stealthie]

Would make it even more interesting if they restricted ships by mass from atmospheric flight completely. That would greatly simplify a lot of the physics modeling/design.

That shouldn't really happen because, fundamentally, gravity is the only thing that dictates whether or not our ships can get off the ground or not.

That's where FDev need to start making decisions about how complex they make atmo' landings, though.

Either they keep things simple and allow our ships to, basically, operate the same as they currently do - but against a backdrop with some pretty skies - or they actually implement things like drag, aero', heat and stress and then it should still be possible to land any ship on any planet but we'll probably have to be a lot more careful when landing big, clumsy ship and/or beercan exploration ships.

Basically, I want landing a T9 on a high g atmo' planet to be like landing the Nostromo on LV426.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

The addition of access to atmospheric worlds definitely seems like a more logical follow-up to Horizons. Right now most of the planets in the galaxy are placeholders in the truest sense of the word. Their existence is nearly meaningless without the ability to land on and explore them.

Legs is an unnecessary and wasteful tangent imo. The galaxy is a big place to traverse on foot. Why walk when you can fly or drive? Why play a so-so FPS add-on here when you could play a pure sci-fi FPS elsewhere?

You wouldnt use legs when flying or driving is more appropriate. Legs wouldn't replace the flight or driving.

I also don't want to play a FPS add-on. I want to play a Elite dangerous where I travel somewhere in my ship, EVA over to a derelict ship and explore/loot it for a mission objective. There are no FPS that allow me to do anything like that.

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

Because it will allow us to sell umbrellas on the commodity market.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

There will be no ships that will be banned from atmospheric landing. The thruster power of the ships means that they are easy to use in an atmosphere with not issues leaving the planets either as they will have no need for terminal velocity.

Also those ships that are not aerodynamic, I'm sure the shields can be reconfigured for atmospheric flight to push the air around the ship in an aerodynamic way.

 

[LanceLord]

That shouldn't really happen because, fundamentally, gravity is the only thing that dictates whether or not our ships can get off the ground or not.

That's where FDev need to start making decisions about how complex they make atmo' landings, though.

Either they keep things simple and allow our ships to, basically, operate the same as they currently do - but against a backdrop with some pretty skies - or they actually implement things like drag, aero', heat and stress and then it should still be possible to land any ship on any planet but we'll probably have to be a lot more careful when landing big, clumsy ship and/or beercan exploration ships.

Basically, I want landing a T9 on a high g atmo' planet to be like landing the Nostromo on LV426.

Personally because I so desperately want FCs AND interactive atmospheric worlds AND space legs (especially the latter two which are still in undefined Rumor Mill status) this fall, then I hope FDev is taking a practical approach. I'd happily keep the existing flight model and settle for a purely cosmetic atmospheric landing experience (the likes of a NMS or Subnautica which suggest the ship is obeying the natural laws of physics). I'd take that v. a hardcore, ultra realistic, SC-marries-Space-Engineers version. Since this ultra realistic flight model update would have to obey realistic Newtonian physics. And so would be brutally demanding on the coding design end. Which in turn, would increase FDev's development and design risk jeopardy of not meeting the 2020 deadline from unresolved tech issues.

So yeah, I'd vote to keep the existing planetary descent flight model against pretty SC vista backdrops like you said. Add volumetric effects like gas/particle clouds, ionic plasma storms etc. But these atmospheric effects wouldn't actually affect ship performance in a functional way. They would be strictly cosmetic ie. noise/animation effects, camera shaking to simulate plane turbulence in flight etc. You wouldn't be able to see the full extent of cosmetic damage to your ship until you landed and entered the repair hangar. Similar to the way you currently can whenever you visit HO. That would be a reasonable half way solution that could meet fan base need for atmospheric flight, while reducing design/coding/testing etc. time on FDev part.

There will be no ships that will be banned from atmospheric landing. The thruster power of the ships means that they are easy to use in an atmosphere with not issues leaving the planets either as they will have no need for terminal velocity.

Also those ships that are not aerodynamic, I'm sure the shields can be reconfigured for atmospheric flight to push the air around the ship in an aerodynamic way.

So you're on the FDev team then? Sounds like you're making that claim as fact...

Don't see how that would be feasible unless they keep the existing flight model and use purely cosmetic atmospheric effects. Because if the heaviest ships were permissible with an updated atmospheric flight model, it would be very challenging trying to land something the size of an Anaconda or Type 10 on a high G Jupiter type planet. Nevermind trying to land a behemoth capital ship class vehicle the likes of a FC based on pilot skill. The crazy mortality rate for experienced Cmnders during the 2017 Distant Worlds 2 expedition is a lesson to be learned IMO

 

[Stealthie]

Personally because I so desperately want FCs AND interactive atmospheric worlds AND space legs (especially the latter two which are still in undefined Rumor Mill status) this fall, then I hope FDev is taking a practical approach. I'd happily keep the existing flight model and settle for a purely cosmetic atmospheric landing experience (the likes of a NMS or Subnautica which suggest the ship is obeying the natural laws of physics). I'd take that v. a hardcore, ultra realistic, SC-marries-Space-Engineers version. Since this ultra realistic flight model update would have to obey realistic Newtonian physics. And so would be brutally demanding on the coding design end. Which in turn, would increase FDev's development and design risk jeopardy of not meeting the 2020 deadline from unresolved tech issues.

So yeah, I'd vote to keep the existing planetary descent flight model against pretty SC vista backdrops like you said. Add volumetric effects like gas/particle clouds, ionic plasma storms etc. But these atmospheric effects wouldn't actually affect ship performance in a functional way. They would be strictly cosmetic ie. noise/animation effects, camera shaking to simulate plane turbulence in flight etc. You wouldn't be able to see the full extent of cosmetic damage to your ship until you landed and entered the repair hangar. Similar to the way you currently can whenever you visit HO. That would be a reasonable half way solution that could meet fan base need for atmospheric flight, while reducing design/coding/testing etc. time on FDev part.

I suspect people are probably getting sick of hearing it but KSP handled this in a smart way, which FDev might consider.

What they did, basically, was implement all the physics-stuff but then set all the variables and factors to zero while they implemented more important stuff and only enabled all the physics afterwards.

I would like to see the basic "glide" procedure updated, simply 'cos it'd be refreshing to have a new aspect of flying a pretend spaceship.
If they decided to do that, it might be smart for FDev to put in a bunch of physics-stuff, even if they didn't have time to tune it all and enable it on day 1.

See, this is where FDev worries me at times, and it's a shame that things end-up like that.

They have a habit of bunging "place-holder" mechanics into the game and players don't really worry about it because they accept it is a place-holder - which they assume will be replaced by something more detailed at a later date - but then it's like somebody at FDev decides that people are happy with that mechanic so they either put it at the bottom of the "to update" list or they remove it from the list completely.

I would be totally okay with either space-legs or atmo' landings being a bare-bones implementation on day 1 IF I could be assured that all the fancy features were going to be implemented in a timely manner.

The trick, I guess, is to build all the required systems into the game-engine and then they can be disabled and then only re-enabled after appropriate testing and tweaking.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

An ApsX with integrity of, say, 500 would have a higher stress factor than an iClipper with the same integrity because it's smaller and, thus, not as floppy.0

Conversely so, the clipper has an inherently stronger shape, and its hull weighs a lot more, so it should have more of said "stress resilience stat".

Would make it even more interesting if they restricted ships by mass from atmospheric flight completely.

No - just NO! We've already had capital ships on planets surfaces in the pleiades which indicates they can take the gravitational strain. And as you have already been informed, gravity is the king of forces for a planetary landing in a spaceship, followed closely by aerodynamics.

That shouldn't really happen because, fundamentally, gravity is the only thing that dictates whether or not our ships can get off the ground or not.

Very much this - its the (gravity x mass) to thrust ratio that determines if the ship can get off the surface, if anyone doubts stealthies assertion they just try and put a poorly thurstered ship on a massive high-G planets surface to see this for themselves.

That's where FDev need to start making decisions about how complex they make atmo' landings, though.

Either they keep things simple and allow our ships to, basically, operate the same as they currently do - but against a backdrop with some pretty skies - or they actually implement things like drag, aero', heat and stress and then it should still be possible to land any ship on any planet but we'll probably have to be a lot more careful when landing big, clumsy ship and/or beercan exploration ships.

Basically, I want landing a T9 on a high g atmo' planet to be like landing the Nostromo on LV426.

I walso want to have a complicated skillful "in the pipe 5 by 5" mechanics, failure to keep it in the pipe should result in structural damage and high temperature buildups. It should be possible to tear a ship apart by goofing up an atmospheric entry, and possible the right equipment (atmospheric shields/plating) and a perfectly executed "5 by 5" to make it to the planets surface with no damage.

So yeah, I'd vote to keep the existing planetary descent flight model against pretty SC vista backdrops like you said. Add volumetric effects like gas/particle clouds, ionic plasma storms etc. But these atmospheric effects wouldn't actually affect ship performance in a functional way. They would be strictly cosmetic ie. noise/animation effects, camera shaking to simulate plane turbulence in flight etc. You wouldn't be able to see the full extent of cosmetic damage to your ship until you landed and entered the repair hangar. Similar to the way you currently can whenever you visit HO. That would be a reasonable half way solution that could meet fan base need for atmospheric flight, while reducing design/coding/testing etc. time on FDev part.

This is the least compelling case for atmospheric landings ever, its literally a recipie for scan/shoot/scoop under a subtly shaded sky box. There are already mechanics in game for ships to encounter turbulent effects, like trying tosuperchage an FSD on a neutron star, or follow a thargoid wake or being buffeted by the explosions in a buring station after a thargoid attack, or in an interdiction tether. Tacking those turbulence algorithms onto our current planetary landings with a skybox rendered using the weather engine from planet zoo and or jurassic world evolution, would be a "minimum viable product", and certainly not worthy of a two year development program. Nor would it add anything to game play, so much so if that is what we get offered I'd say it wasn't worth doing.

IF FDev do atmospheric planets, they need a proper re-entry "mini game", with acourse to follow, and dire consequences for deviating from it, the ships need aerodynamically reviewed and an in atmosphere flight model that, even loosely, takes into account the ships aerodynamics. Let me put it this way, presently an asp can boost faster than a python. The asp is the shape of a boulder, the python the shape of an arrowhead. The pythons shape should be better aerodynamically thus the python should leave an asp eating dust in an atmosphere. I know there will have to be a balance of gameplay vs verisimilitude, but if citing the example above, an asp performs better in atmospheres because it has more of some arbitrairily assigned magical structural stat than the aeroplane shaped clipper or the arrowhead shaped python, I am sure you would agree that deviation from plausible dynamics would cheapen the experience somewhat.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Why atmospheric landings? Why not? I can't think of a good reason. and I'm pretty sure anybody else's good reasons will look silly to me anyways

 

[LanceLord]

I suspect people are probably getting sick of hearing it but KSP handled this in a smart way, which FDev might consider.

What they did, basically, was implement all the physics-stuff but then set all the variables and factors to zero while they implemented more important stuff and only enabled all the physics afterwards....

OMG lol wut? I haven't played KSP (visual aesthetics are a bit too much on the cartoony end for my taste). But by "enabling all the physics afterwards" the game literally WORKED with minor to negligible CTD, bugs, glitches and other typical Murphy's Law hanky panky? This has left me very intrigued. Think I'll watch the reviews and a YT playthrough of this.

edit: ok nvm. Re-read your post and finally got what you meant by turning off the physics. Disregard the brainfart.

 

[LanceLord]

Conversely so, the clipper has an inherently stronger shape, and its hull weighs a lot more, so it should have more of said "stress resilience stat".


No - just NO! We've already had capital ships on planets surfaces in the pleiades which indicates they can take the gravitational strain. And as you have already been informed, gravity is the king of forces for a planetary landing in a spaceship, followed closely by aerodynamics.


Very much this - its the (gravity x mass) to thrust ratio that determines if the ship can get off the surface, if anyone doubts stealthies assertion they just try and put a poorly thurstered ship on a massive high-G planets surface to see this for themselves.


I walso want to have a complicated skillful "in the pipe 5 by 5" mechanics, failure to keep it in the pipe should result in structural damage and high temperature buildups. It should be possible to tear a ship apart by goofing up an atmospheric entry, and possible the right equipment (atmospheric shields/plating) and a perfectly executed "5 by 5" to make it to the planets surface with no damage.


This is the least compelling case for atmospheric landings ever, its literally a recipie for scan/shoot/scoop under a subtly shaded sky box. There are already mechanics in game for ships to encounter turbulent effects, like trying tosuperchage an FSD on a neutron star, or follow a thargoid wake or being buffeted by the explosions in a buring station after a thargoid attack, or in an interdiction tether. Tacking those turbulence algorithms onto our current planetary landings with a skybox rendered using the weather engine from planet zoo and or jurassic world evolution, would be a "minimum viable product", and certainly not worthy of a two year development program. Nor would it add anything to game play, so much so if that is what we get offered I'd say it wasn't worth doing.

IF FDev do atmospheric planets, they need a proper re-entry "mini game", with acourse to follow, and dire consequences for deviating from it, the ships need aerodynamically reviewed and an in atmosphere flight model that, even loosely, takes into account the ships aerodynamics. Let me put it this way, presently an asp can boost faster than a python. The asp is the shape of a boulder, the python the shape of an arrowhead. The pythons shape should be better aerodynamically thus the python should leave an asp eating dust in an atmosphere. I know there will have to be a balance of gameplay vs verisimilitude, but if citing the example above, an asp performs better in atmospheres because it has more of some arbitrairily assigned magical structural stat than the aeroplane shaped clipper or the arrowhead shaped python, I am sure you would agree that deviation from plausible dynamics would cheapen the experience somewhat.

Hi there. So does this mean you think all of this ambitious realism could be implemented in time for the 2020 update later this fall?

I've been burned too many times by titles that promised the universe and failed to deliver. The likes of SC and lately ED you see.......

edit: as for aerodynamic shapes and cross sections, I can't wait to see what a Type 10 heavy would look like v. a Sidey on a 5 degree angle of attack

 

[Stealthie]

OMG lol wut? I haven't played KSP (visual aesthetics are a bit too much on the cartoony end for my taste). But by "enabling all the physics afterwards" the game literally WORKED with minor to negligible CTD, bugs, glitches and other typical Murphy's Law hanky panky? This has left me very intrigued. Think I'll watch the reviews and a YT playthrough of this.

Technically, not all the physics was disabled.

Oddly enough, KSP was set up spookily similar to what ED currently is, and became what ED might be in the future.

Squad did all the sums for lift, drag, atmospheric density, friction etc but then they disabled most of it so all that affected a spacecraft was gravity (and a simplified version of lift).
A lot of players threw their toys out of their prams when Squad enabled all the advanced physics cos it meant a lot of their pre-existing ships suddenly started exploding and/or disintegrating after the physics update.

Course, clever people had already examined KSP and created mod's which enabled all the physics stuff so some people were already aware how big the changes would be.

Thing is, in KSP failure is expected so players didn't really get too bent out of shape over it, in the long-term at least.

In ED I have a feeling that FDev might limit the extent of any physics implementation for fear of having a gazillion people wailing about how much time and effort they put into, say, DD5 thrusters which now (after a physics update) cause your ship to overheat and then disintegrate when you reach high speeds.
Which, I guess, is a fair point.

 

[Lightspeed]

Hi there. So does this mean you think all of this ambitious realism could be implemented in time for the 2020 update later this fall?

I've been burned too many times by titles that promised the universe and failed to deliver. The likes of SC and lately ED you see.......

edit: as for aerodynamic shapes and cross sections, I can't wait to see what a Type 10 heavy would look like v. a Sidey on a 5 degree angle of attack

This managed ok ..... (it could be the spoiler) ......

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I have looked at the shapes. It's probably fair to say that a photograph of any of them could be used in a definition of aerodynamic. As in 'Nothing Whatsoever Like This'. Excepting maybe the Eagle, Clipper, or Cutter. Maybe.

My conclusion ? If we are to be allowed to take them into atmosphere - as opposed to needing separate landing craft designed for aerodynamic flight - then surely they are going to have to behave more like helicopters than airplanes? Your vertical thrusters are your rotor(s), laterals are your tail-rotor, you just get some added ballistic flight capability from your mains. FA-off might be a liability in such a case too, unless the 'atmospheric capability pack', or whatever it gets called, seriously upgrades the thrusters.

An interesting concept all round, really.

While I am personally of the opinion that the main game should be given a serious addition of depth before adding atmospheric landings or legs - not that I am fundamentally opposed to either one - I could easily lose hundreds of hours just flying about if any of the above is close to reality. Big ships would probably be a no-no, but the individual flight characteristics of the rest - and the desire to discover them - damn, I might never get back into space!

In fairness most current generation fighter jets are inherently aerodynamically unstable and stabilised on the fly by the flight computer, I'd anticipate such systems being implemented on spaceships in atmosphere, with the cavaet that maybe your helicopter analogy is more apt than you realise as maybe ships underside thrusters would have to be enhanced to give them harrier style ability for vtol and straffing manouvers?

Atmospheric landing without space legs wouldn’t really add any meaningful gameplay.

Amen brother, see my post...

I mean we are meant to be playing as the pilot, this guy:

And while this might be pretty:

It would be pretty lame if all we could do when we touched down there was:

On thrusters and the possible need for an upgrade I was thinking purely in terms of FA-off flight and it occurred to me that suddenly deciding to tumble the ship into an inverted reverse orientation whilst at the same time combating aerodynamic drag factors trying to resist such a manouevre might need more than they've currently got. Of course I'd forgotten that they can already happily outlift the pull of 5g and more, so, hey! Put it down to it being early and I'm an idiot

I fly 100% FAoff, and I envisage atmospheres being a to FAoff manouvere in, see my reference to aerodynamically fighterjets, but simply put if you are travelling forward horizontal to the ground at 300m/s in the void, you can pitch up and the ship will only turn at the rate you ilicited with your thruster input, in an atmosphere when you pitch up with FAoff, you are going to present an ever increasing area for the wind, which is effectively what the 300m/s you are traveling creates relative to the surface of your ship, to act on. So once the angle of attack changes slightly on the pitch axis, the wind will get under the ship and start acting upwards on the underside rapidly flipping it, way faster than the pilot could react to. So where in the void with FAoff you pitch up a little and pitch down a little to counter it, in atmospheres you would need to pitch up ananoscopic ammount, and pitch down a gargantuos ammount to counter the pitch up input plus the winds contribution to the ships rotation.

The Hauler, Adder and FdL are not dissimilar to 20th century lifting body and space shuttle designs so would probably work at least at high speed.
But I agree the flight model is going to be much closer to the Flying Bedstead than a Learjet.

I'm in agreeance, but aerodtnamically I don't think the python is that bad either, and possibly the gutamaya ships, mostly the clipper for the empire.Flight model wise, I'm not expecting miracles, as in I'm hoping more aerodynamic ships like the eagle and viper do better than say the type 6 and asp, but I'm not expecting any Eurofighters/F22 Raptors to emerge from our SPACE SHIPS - which are not AEROPLANES.

We shouldn't conflate the ideas that "atmospheric flight is dependant on thrusters" and "thrusters are the only thing that has an effect on atmospheric flight" with each other, though.

We currently de-orbit and enter a glide-phase which sees our ships whizzing downwards at a rate of a couple of thousand m/sec, for example.
If we descend too steeply, or not steeply enough, the glide terminates and we have to continue down to the surface at regular speed.

If atmo' landings are to be modelled with any level of authenticity, that's going to become significantly more complex.

I'd suggest, for example, that we might de-orbit in a planet's thermosphere and then we'll get some kind of glide-slope appear on our HUD, arcing toward the surface at a rate that corresponds with our speed.
We'll then have the extent of the planet's thermosphere to align ourselves with the glide-slope and "fly through the hoops" on our way down to the surface.

As we pass through the mesosphere, stratosphere and trophosphere, continuing to fly through the hoops, we're going to start getting buffeted around, our speed is going to decrease, our ships are going to heat up due to drag and the glide-slope might adjust depending on ambient atmospheric conditions.

During the glide, if we stray above the glide-slope then our rate of descent will reduce, our velocity will continue to reduce and that'll mean we simply won't be able to glide down to our intended destination because we'll have permanantly bled away some of the speed required to maintain the calculated glide-slope.
Instead, we'll overshoot our intended destination and then we'll have to fly back to it at normal speed.
Conversely, if we stray below the glide-slope then our rate of descent will increase, our ships will become more difficult to control, they'll heat up more as a result of drag, we'll risk causing damage and we'll arrive at the surface short of our destination and we'll have to continue to it at normal speed.

There'll also, unfortunately, be something of a "double whammy" at work for certain ships too.
A ship like a T9, for example, doesn't have a very high top speed in normal flight and it's likely to have a high Cd.
That means it's going to rely heavily on optimising it's trans-orbital velocity to plough through an atmosphere on it's way down to a planet's surface.

Basically, in a T9, if you're on too shallow a glide you're going to bleed away speed until you have a top speed of, perhaps, 100m/sec and you'll still be 50km above the surface.
Conversely, if you're on too steep a glide, the ship's going to become difficult to control and you're going to start burning up unless you modify your descent path.

At any point during the descent you will have the option of simply throttling-down and allowing your thrusters to keep you aloft but that'll mean you'll lose your trans-orbital velocity and you'll have to continue with your descent at your normal speed which, depending on atmospheric conditions, your ship's Cd and available thrust, might take a looong time.


We're never going to crash into an atmospheric planet's surface as a result of inadequate aerodynamics but, if aerodynamics are modelled with any kind of realism, we could find that it becomes much tricker to land on a planet's surface in a timely manner (or without burning up), we could find that we have to fly much slower in an atmosphere in order to retain control of our ships and we could find that getting back up into orbit again takes significantly longer as well.

And I'm really hoping for all of that.

I'm not expecting it, though, unfortunately.

I like your thinking there, not entirely how I'd have modelled re-entry but I do like your solution.

Oh yeah, for sure.

As anybody who's ever aborted a glide will know, getting down to the surface under your own steam is pretty tedious.
I wouldn't be surprised if the first internal beta's of Horizons simply had the player dropping out of SC somewhere in orbit so you could fly down to the surface and then somebody (wisely) realised it'd be a good idea to add the glide just to get you down there quicker.

Thing is, if they're going to make a decent job of planetary atmospheres we're going to need to experience the whole thing.
We're going to need to drop out of SC somewhere in a low orbit, where we'll still be travelling at a trans-orbital speed (which would be a bit like the start of the current glide), and then we're going to have to travel down through the thermosphere, start heating up and slowing down, head into the mesosphere, still heating up and slowing down but there might be some friction effects now and the atmosphere might be getting hazy, into the stratosphere, still slowing down and generating some heat but now we'll be seeing atmospheric effects as well and then, finally, into the trophosphere where we'll be slowing almost to regular cruising speed, we'll be getting the full atmospheric effects and we might even start to see our engines overheating if we push them too hard in a thick atmosphere (?).

And they need to balance all that against the original philosophy of getting us down to the surface in a timely manner, while also making it an engaging experience.


If they haven't already, FDev could (as usual) probably benefit from looking at how KSP handles entering an atmosphere.

At the one extreme, you can do a retro-burn in orbit to reduce your orbital speed to zero.
You'll then fall out of orbit like a stone, you'll accelerate to terminal velocity (which is stupid-fast until you actually enter the atmosphere and begin to slow down as a result of drag), your ship will start to burn up as it encounters the atmosphere and - even if it survives - you'll probably find that you're still going stupid-fast when you crater into the surface.

At the other extreme, you can do the ideal de-orbit burn, so you're travelling at just less that orbital velocity.
You can then modify your trajectory, and use your thrusters, to minimise your rate of descent.
You'll generate almost no friction-heating but you'll slow down really slowly and it'll take you hours to actually land on the surface.

Somewhere in the middle there is, of course, the optimal descent slope, where you're not generating excessive friction-heating, you are descending at a reasonable rate but you won't be travelling so fast that you can't pull out of the descent.

In KSP that's a pretty difficult task because you have limited fuel and you don't want to be carrying excess fuel during the descent because it all adds to the mass that has to be decelerated to a safe landing velocity.
In ED there should be much more latitude because our ships can generate massive amounts of thrust using tiny quantities of fuel but the same basic parameters should apply.

I think that were atmospheric re-entry made into a game mechanic akin to current planetary approach, deviating from the glide slope window ought to start to pick up heat and structural damage, and the less aerodynamic a ship is, as in the higher its Cd or the thicker the atmosphere is, the worse those penalties should be.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Hi there. So does this mean you think all of this ambitious realism could be implemented in time for the 2020 update later this fall?

I've been burned too many times by titles that promised the universe and failed to deliver. The likes of SC and lately ED you see.......

edit: as for aerodynamic shapes and cross sections, I can't wait to see what a Type 10 heavy would look like v. a Sidey on a 5 degree angle of attack

Yeah! Just add ship kits for their spoilers, Duh!

No, seriosuly, starting now as a knee jerk OMG they are talking about it in the forums lets tack it onto New Era, a "full on" atmospheric flight system is not possible. Had they decided back in 2017 when new era would still have been at the creative design meetings stage to do a proper atmospheric engine, then yeah, an elite:kerbal atmospherics implementation would have been possible for the new era update. We don't know what they are doing, and the presumption is legs, but we don't know.

If new era is legs, and there is a strong demand for it, they could roll out a QD-Atmospherics in about a year after they stopped whack-a-moling the inevitable new era bugs and exploits. They could do this by using all the turbulence algorithims I mentioned, a rehasehd interdiciton mini game with flames instead of cerenkov radiation, and as you lost the "re entry minigame" more flames and ship heat and damage occuring, for the atmosphere entry procedure. When the player was in the atmosphere, assuming they survived the re entry to get that far and not to reuy screen, they would find themselves in an atmosphere which would require FAon* to be on, see other comments about fighterjets and aerodynamic instability, and use the simplist shading for the skybox and volumetric effects for the clouds you suggest.

*Reason for FAon being obligatory in QDA implementaiton of atmospheres is essentially they would be just reskinned verisons of airless moons we currently go to, so there would be no aerodyminac models or effects on our ships flight models, so the first FAoff manouvere on a planet would unmask what a smoke and mirrors job masking the massive botch that QDAtmospheres really was.

There would not however be an proper weather system made with that sort of Quick and Dirty Admospheres approach, nor seasonal effects so the planets surface environment and would be static and possibly barren, MS Flight Sim 2020 levels of detailed planets would be off the table. More like atmospheric planets from Frontier Elite 2.

Being honest with you, I think a lot of people on here think they wish FDev would just do atmospheric planets now, even if it were QD-A as outlined above, but I think if they got it it wouldn't be long before they seen just how little a minumum viable product implementaion of atmospheres like we are discussing here would actually bring to the game, and then they might understand the true meaning of "be careful what you wish for".

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

It was so much better when there just 12 of us and we were talking about The Outsider and whether RCT3 was test development for Elite IV.

Was that back in the dialup days? When the "forum" was actually a BBS?

 

[Layne Vakarian]

Hmmm.
Disclaimer: What I know about fluid dynamics could be written on the head of a pin after everything-ever-written-ever had been written there first. Including this sentence.

I rather suspect some people have unrealistic expectations of what can be done with atmospheric flight modelling. Earth-like worlds, sure, maybe. Martian style low-density atmospheres too, why not? High density atmospherics - Jupiter and the like - though? Weeeell...

The thrusters are presumably propelling something out of their ports/nozzles/whatevers in order to work. This, lets call it propellant, this propellant has to push through/on/against whatever it finds when it leaves the thruster. Fine in space, there's no resistance at all. Less so on Earth, because we have good old air, but importantly not a great deal of it, even at sea-level. Mars, would be even less of a problem. Jupiter though? Easy enough to skim the upper reaches maybe, but further in? A bit like flying through syrup I'd have thought? Very, very thick syrup.

Won't this put enormous stress on the thrusters? What's that doing to the 'airframe'. And where is the heat going to go? I mean I would have thought there's going to be rather a lot of it. Oh, and Jupiter is made of Hydrogen isn't it. Yes helium too, and others, but unless my information is faulty, mostly hydrogen. It's a hydrogen soup planet. And we're taking along a match? Cue interesting visual effects and colourful language from Commanders.

Then there's the question of 'airframe' integrity. I mean forget g-forces, what happens when you use your super-duper-yay-I-can-overcome-9g+-thrusters in this muck? Do the wings come off? Does the spine snap? The windshield - yes, the freaking windshield! - does it decide it wasn't exactly built for this kind of work and pop out for a breather? But we have shields I hear you cry. Maybe you do, but remember you wanted realism, and your shields may very well be about to go offline on account of the gazillions of joules of heat busily eating away at your capacitors. And everything else that hasn't fallen off yet.

Now I know what you're thinking, you're thinking edge-case. You're thinking that, I don't know, some 3g water world isn't going to be as bad and I'm just being awkward and I'm not going to argue. What I'm trying - badly, probably - to do is to illustrate that once you leave Earth, or space - call it 'known values' - what you have is a pretty much endless list of variables to fiddle with. For FD to fiddle with. If they decide to even attempt realism or even realism-lite, I foresee more problems arising than it will be worth their time to solve. Not to say they couldn't solve them, but that mostly it'd not pay them back with the reward of a satisfied market. I give you the 'Realism-lite effect'. Good enough for the majority, do-able in a decent time frame, easy to maintain.

My point is this: My suspicion is that a great many players aren't going to be concerned about the realism that actually could or should be, but only about the realism they are able to perceive. Sure, sure, many players are (like me), and I acknowledge that, but I suspect that we are in the minority. I'm certainly in the minority when it comes to an ability to evaluate the realism, and I suspect that goes for the majority of players. So I think it likely what we'll get is a 'fun and (possibly) challenging experience', but nothing even close to a fluid dynamics simulation engine buffeting our accurately modelled individual ship-behaviours.

So yeah. Reach for the sky fellas, but don't be surprised if it turns out it's painted on the ceiling within easy reach.

 

[Stealthie]

The thrusters are presumably propelling something out of their ports/nozzles/whatevers in order to work....

....

Won't this put enormous stress on the thrusters? What's that doing to the 'airframe'. And where is the heat going to go?

Firstly, regarding thrusters, our ships certainly look like they use fairly conventional thrusters - of some sort - as the main source of propulsion but our positional thrusters are just glowy blue "nozzles" which are, apparently, capable of generating phenomenal amounts of thrust.
Seriously, if you consider that a bunch of glowy blue nozzles are generating sufficient thrust to keep a 2000t T10 aloft on a 5g planet, you have to wonder why the same T10 actually needs those honking great main thrusters in order to make it move forwards at 300m/sec.
I haven't done the maths but I'd bet a couple of those glowy blue nozzles provide as much thrust as way more thrust than a ship's main thrusters.
Probably best if we don't think about this too much, but I digress.

Point is, we have got the glowy blue positional thrusters and they look a bit like the ion thrusters outfits like NASA are currently speculating might be a good way to move spaceships around in the future.
Ion thrusters don't, AFAIK, produce an exhaust that is likely to act as a source of ignition for combustible gases.
Course, currently Ion thrusters don't work at all in anything other than a vacuum and they only produce a miniscule percentage of the thrust ED ships would require but I guess, maybe, we can put that down to a thousand years of development.

Also, speaking of a thousand years of development, if the ships in ED did use thrusters that might act as a source of ingition when operating within a planet's atmosphere, that's probably the sort of thing that would have been discovered (rather casastrophically) hundreds of years ago and been fixed long before the first Anaconda took to the skies.


Issues surrounding airframe stress have already been raised many times in ED and, again, it's probably best if we don't think about it too much.
An Anaconda, for example, has those 6 extra landing-legs that appear to support it's main cargo bay.
Thing is, if it needs those extra landing-legs to support the cargo bay when it's sitting on a landing-pad, how come it doesn't disintegrate when it's hovering and all that weight is hanging off the airframe, supported by the glowy blue nozzles?
My own pet-theory is that the Annie doesn't actually need those landing-legs to support the weight of the cargo bay and, instead, they're there 'cos the cargo bay can detach, kind of like the pod on Thunderbird 2.

There's plenty of other oddities too, though, which can't be dismissed as easily.
When you've got a ship like an Annie, that's 150m long and has a pitch-rate of around 70°/sec, the front of the ship is accelerating to around 200mph in 1 second when you pull back on the stick, which equates to about 9g - which would be enough to kill anybody unfortunate enough to be in that fancy observation area near the nose, regardless of whether they're wearing magnetic boots or not.

So, erm, yeah.

There's already a lot of oddness related to things like inertia and stress in ED.
About the best we can really hope for is that ED model the physics so it, at least, acknowledges differences in atmospheric density so that, perhaps, an Annie that has a pitch-rate of 70°/sec in vacuum has a significantly slower pitch-rate in a dense atmosphere and generates more heat as a result of the thrusters having to work harder to move the ship around.
Like I've said, I would like to see stress modelled - not necessarily accurately, but well enough that you could damage a ship by flying it erratically in an atmosphere.

 

[Layne Vakarian]

Firstly, regarding thrusters, our ships certainly look like they use fairly conventional thrusters - of some sort - as the main source of propulsion but our positional thrusters are just glowy blue "nozzles" which are, apparently, capable of generating phenomenal amounts of thrust.
Seriously, if you consider that a bunch of glowy blue nozzles are generating sufficient thrust to keep a 2000t T10 aloft on a 5g planet, you have to wonder why the same T10 actually needs those honking great main thrusters in order to make it move forwards at 300m/sec.
I haven't done the maths but I'd bet a couple of those glowy blue nozzles provide as much thrust as way more thrust than a ship's main thrusters.
Probably best if we don't think about this too much, but I digress.

Point is, we have got the glowy blue positional thrusters and they look a bit like the ion thrusters outfits like NASA are currently speculating might be a good way to move spaceships around in the future.
Ion thrusters don't, AFAIK, produce an exhaust that is likely to act as a source of ignition for combustible gases.
Course, currently Ion thrusters don't work at all in anything other than a vacuum and they only produce a miniscule percentage of the thrust ED ships would require but I guess, maybe, we can put that down to a thousand years of development.

Also, speaking of a thousand years of development, if the ships in ED did use thrusters that might act as a source of ingition when operating within a planet's atmosphere, that's probably the sort of thing that would have been discovered (rather casastrophically) hundreds of years ago and been fixed long before the first Anaconda took to the skies.


Issues surrounding airframe stress have already been raised many times in ED and, again, it's probably best if we don't think about it too much.
An Anaconda, for example, has those 6 extra landing-legs that appear to support it's main cargo bay.
Thing is, if it needs those extra landing-legs to support the cargo bay when it's sitting on a landing-pad, how come it doesn't disintegrate when it's hovering and all that weight is hanging off the airframe, supported by the glowy blue nozzles?
My own pet-theory is that the Annie doesn't actually need those landing-legs to support the weight of the cargo bay and, instead, they're there 'cos the cargo bay can detach, kind of like the pod on Thunderbird 2.

There's plenty of other oddities too, though, which can't be dismissed as easily.
When you've got a ship like an Annie, that's 150m long and has a pitch-rate of around 70°/sec, the front of the ship is accelerating to around 200mph in 1 second, which equates to about 9g - which would be enough to kill anybody unfortunate enough to be in that fancy observation area near the nose, regardless of whether they're wearing magnetic boots or not.

So, erm, yeah.

There's already a lot of oddness related to things like inertia and stress in ED.
About the best we can really hope for is that ED model the physics so it, at least, acknowledges differences in atmospheric density so that, perhaps, an Annie that has a pitch-rate of 70°/sec in vacuum has a significantly slower pitch-rate in a dense atmosphere and generates more heat as a result of the thrusters having to work harder to move the ship around.
Like I've said, I would like to see stress modelled - not necessarily accurately, but well enough that you could damage a ship by flying it erratically in an atmosphere.

Errm, yeah. All of it. Particularly the last line which is about what I expect, if and when. I'll take it.

P.S. I'd far rather have had a 'Glowy Blue Nozzle' module than boring and mundane thruster module. It would have fit in right alongside the 'Handwavium Generator' we could have had instead of the boring and mundane powerplant.

P.P.S. Detachable cargo bay for the Annie! I'd love that to be an animated feature. Perhaps a strongly worded open letter...

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I think that were atmospheric re-entry made into a game mechanic akin to current planetary approach, deviating from the glide slope window ought to start to pick up heat and structural damage, and the less aerodynamic a ship is, as in the higher its Cd or the thicker the atmosphere is, the worse those penalties should be.

We wouldn't need to have heat buildup. Ships can fly down to the planet surface pretty slowly without any heat buildup. The reason why the shuttle and other reentry craft have a huge amount of heat buildup is because they are traveling around 20,000mph and heat up during reentry.

Travelling at 800mph which will build minimal heat even in the most un-aerodynamic vehicle will get us to the planet surface in no time at all. Heat won't be an issue, leaving won't be an issue with the thrusters we have either.

I think people expect reentry to be like it is today. It won't be and doesn't need to be.

 

[Layne Vakarian]

We wouldn't need to have heat buildup. Ships can fly down to the planet surface pretty slowly without any heat buildup. The reason why the shuttle and other reentry craft have a huge amount of heat buildup is because they are traveling around 20,000mph and heat up during reentry.

Travelling at 800mph which will build minimal heat even in the most un-aerodynamic vehicle will get us to the planet surface in no time at all. Heat won't be an issue, leaving won't be an issue with the thrusters we have either.

I think people expect reentry to be like it is today. It won't be and doesn't need to be.

Well that's no fun at all!