Why do we take so much hull damage from landing?

[GreyAreaUK]

I'm out exploring in a Python on my PS4 account. Just for shiggles I decided to try a 'no shields' variant, with AFMU and hull repair limpets. So far so good.

However, one thing is becoming clear: landings are murderous. I'm not going to claim to being the best landing pilot out there (especially with a PS4 controller) but it seems a bit excessive.

As an example: last night I was landing on a 0.09G rock. I got very near the surface (<10m), deployed the gear, found a nice blue bit, gently (and I really do mean gently) descended. Then, at the last second, the scanner did its famous 'blue? Sorry, I meant red' routine (despite there being none, nada, zero forward motion) and crunch - I lost 12% hull.

12%

My vertical speed was as close to zero as makes no odds, the gear were down.

12%.

Seriously FDEV, what the actual heck? If the gear weren't deployed I could sort of understand it (well, no, not really in fact) but landing gear are supposed to give some protection to this sort of thing. 1% or 2% I could sort of understand, but 12%? Come on. Our hulls aren't that fragile!

Thankfully I'm only 80 jumps out of Colonia, so it's back I go to equip some token shields. I can repair the hull with limpets obviously, but (1) it becomes quite tedious quite quickly, and (2) it became obvious that it wouldn't take much to have a catastrophic incident.

In short: I just feel our hulls take damage far too easily when landing.

 

[Jmanis]

Light-weight alloy hull? Try replacing that with Military Grade Alloys and you'll take a hit much more handily. But that weighs more than a shield and curtails your jump-range more... sooo.... fit a shield?

Unless you're doing some heavy armour-tanking (which makes something like exploration impractical anyway), I've never really seen the point of no-shield fittings. Accidents happen at the worst times, and that shield with 4 pips to sys will be the difference between life and death for most of them.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Light-weight alloy hull? Try replacing that with Military Grade Alloys and you'll take a hit much more handily. But that weighs more than a shield and curtails your jump-range more... sooo.... fit a shield?

Unless you're doing some heavy armour-tanking (which makes something like exploration impractical anyway), I've never really seen the point of no-shield fittings. Accidents happen at the worst times, and that shield with 4 pips to sys will be the difference between life and death for most of them.

Oh for sure, my main complaint is that we take so much damage just from landing. I take less in combat from a couple of second of MCs (with shields down) than I do from landing. It just seems very out of whack.

 

[Gun Star]

I agree the ships do take some good damage landing no shields.

My Python configuration for trading and exploring is at least a 3A shield. It won't protect you in a extended firefight for long, but with get the job done for the occasional bumps and bruises.also long enough to low wake out of a interdiction.

 

[Loskene]

Can't comment on the hull damage, never happens to me on PC, but I can explain losing your landing spot while descending.
Unless you're perfectly level (which is practically impossible to eyeball) any downward thrust is going to result in some lateral motion as well, as the bottom of your ship is not pointed exactly at the planet's center of gravity. To avoid this when landing in areas where blue spots are few and far between, toggle the flight assist off and on so you descend under gravity with zero lateral motion being imparted.
This is also pretty much the only way to land smoothly and easily on steeply sloped, very uneven terrain. You simply find a blue spot, line up with the rotation marker while still in the air, then FA off and let gravity bring you down into position without drifting away from your parking spot.
Mileage may vary on high-G worlds. Be quick with turning it back on.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

The terrain got a buff recently. Lol

Seriously. It did.

Hit a cliff at full speed = instant rebuy.
Hit a landing pad, on a planet, at full speed = minor shield damage.

Ship and outfitting dependant, of course.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Pumabear8]

I'm out exploring in a Python on my PS4 account. Just for shiggles I decided to try a 'no shields' variant, with AFMU and hull repair limpets. So far so good.

However, one thing is becoming clear: landings are murderous. I'm not going to claim to being the best landing pilot out there (especially with a PS4 controller) but it seems a bit excessive.

As an example: last night I was landing on a 0.09G rock. I got very near the surface (<10m), deployed the gear, found a nice blue bit, gently (and I really do mean gently) descended. Then, at the last second, the scanner did its famous 'blue? Sorry, I meant red' routine (despite there being none, nada, zero forward motion) and crunch - I lost 12% hull.

12%

My vertical speed was as close to zero as makes no odds, the gear were down.

12%.

Seriously FDEV, what the actual heck? If the gear weren't deployed I could sort of understand it (well, no, not really in fact) but landing gear are supposed to give some protection to this sort of thing. 1% or 2% I could sort of understand, but 12%? Come on. Our hulls aren't that fragile!

Thankfully I'm only 80 jumps out of Colonia, so it's back I go to equip some token shields. I can repair the hull with limpets obviously, but (1) it becomes quite tedious quite quickly, and (2) it became obvious that it wouldn't take much to have a catastrophic incident.

In short: I just feel our hulls take damage far too easily when landing.

It is an annoying aspect of the game that sneezing on a light weight alloy hull will damage it, but a tip, when descending in the blue and it suddenly alerts unsuitable terrain again, stop, and only yaw the ship, don't pitch, roll or move in any direction, most of the time this works for me.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

@loskene
@puabear8

Thanks for the tips. Normally I'm absolutely fine with landing and correcting blue/red stuff, this was just one of those times when it happened the instant before I touched down - there was no time to correct. Even so, the amount of damage taken just seems wildly excessive.

To put it in perspective, if we ever get space legs then we'll be able to destroy out ships quite quickly simply by getting out of them and throwing rocks at them for a minute

 

[Rubbernuke]

This happens on any ship really, get the landing angle wrong and you ding your hull.

I have a hulltank Corvette with composite armour, 6000 hull and with a 5m/s decent rate at the wrong angle crunched 2% of my hull.

It used to be even worse, believe it or not. FD tweaked the threshold for damage waaayy down where before a scratch = death.

 

[Ziljan]

Hull damage from landing without shields? What speed are you landing??? No need for hull damage if you fly it right .

 

[Rubbernuke]

You'd think so, many a time I've made a perfect landing only for the landing restraint animation to somehow take off 1% hull.

 

[Pumabear8]

@loskene
@puabear8

Thanks for the tips. Normally I'm absolutely fine with landing and correctling blue/red stuff, this was just one of those times when it happened the instant before I touched down - there was no time to correct. Even so, the amount of damage taken just seems wildly excessive.

To put it in perspective, if we ever get space legs then we'll be able to destroy out ships quite quickly simply by getting out of them and throwing rocks at them for a minute

Yeah, when I run trade loops, it's with light weight alloys and no shields to get best performance and max cargo space, which is why I call them paper planes, even a docking computer can and has done damage to my hull on landing on a pad.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Hull damage from landing without shields? What speed are you landing??? No need for hull damage if you fly it right .

Practically zero speed (as slow as I could manage with the PS4 controller), plus the gravity was really low - 0.09G. The only bad thing was the landing terrain going red at the last instant. I'm not complaining that I took damage, I'm just questioning the severity given the conditions.

 

[Ziljan]

You'd think so, many a time I've made a perfect landing only for the landing restraint animation to somehow take off 1% hull.

The trick is to line up perfectly on a nice flat area, and then toggle FA until you drift via gravity to the surface and the landing gear engages.

Eg, NEVER use down thrust or even slow momentum to reach the ground. Toggle only. Ideally you should finish with FA on and the barest passsive downward vector. Speed should still read 0 the whole time. 1 at the most.

EDIT: For this to work, FA button must be set to HOLD. Not TOGGLE.

 

[Ca$hback]

^This Post

 

[GreyAreaUK]

The trick is to line up perfectly on a nice flat area, and then toggle FA until you drift via gravity to the surface and the landing gear engages.

Eg, NEVER use down thrust or even slow momentum to reach the ground. Toggle only. Ideally you should finish with FA on and the barest passsive downward vector. Speed should still read 0 the whole time. 1 at the most.

I'm not saying you're wrong (because you're not) but it's really rather silly when you think about it. We have landing gear. They're supposed to absorb some (arguably quite a lot) of the shock of landing.

 

[V'larr]

You'd think shields would just have a Core Internal slot in all ships, since everything seems to indicate that, from a design point of view, the message is "Always have a shield on." Even if just one to prevent bump-and-scrape damage.

I mean, that's the idea I've embraced, since landing *perfectly* in a shield-less ship still made me take damage and I just wasn't comfortable with that.

 

[Good Death]

I'm out exploring in a Python on my PS4 account. Just for shiggles I decided to try a 'no shields' variant, with AFMU and hull repair limpets. So far so good.

However, one thing is becoming clear: landings are murderous. I'm not going to claim to being the best landing pilot out there (especially with a PS4 controller) but it seems a bit excessive.

As an example: last night I was landing on a 0.09G rock. I got very near the surface (<10m), deployed the gear, found a nice blue bit, gently (and I really do mean gently) descended. Then, at the last second, the scanner did its famous 'blue? Sorry, I meant red' routine (despite there being none, nada, zero forward motion) and crunch - I lost 12% hull.

12%

My vertical speed was as close to zero as makes no odds, the gear were down.

12%.

Seriously FDEV, what the actual heck? If the gear weren't deployed I could sort of understand it (well, no, not really in fact) but landing gear are supposed to give some protection to this sort of thing. 1% or 2% I could sort of understand, but 12%? Come on. Our hulls aren't that fragile!

Thankfully I'm only 80 jumps out of Colonia, so it's back I go to equip some token shields. I can repair the hull with limpets obviously, but (1) it becomes quite tedious quite quickly, and (2) it became obvious that it wouldn't take much to have a catastrophic incident.

In short: I just feel our hulls take damage far too easily when landing.

You're completely right. But it has been brought up before and nothing was done about. I've made perfect (shieldless) landings and received no damage and vice versa. Its probably RNG jk.

 

[Rubbernuke]

The trick is to line up perfectly on a nice flat area, and then toggle FA until you drift via gravity to the surface and the landing gear engages.

Eg, NEVER use down thrust or even slow momentum to reach the ground. Toggle only. Ideally you should finish with FA on and the barest passsive downward vector. Speed should still read 0 the whole time. 1 at the most.

EDIT: For this to work, FA button must be set to HOLD. Not TOGGLE.

Ah! Thats very clever, I never realised. Cheers for the tip!

 

[Marra Morgan]

Hull damage from landing without shields? What speed are you landing??? No need for hull damage if you fly it right .

This!

Gently does it