I seriously prefer flying bricks, for having aerodynamic forces that actually significantly affect a ship capable of escaping the atmosphere with little effort… Makes no sense.
Imagine a heat pocket, and friction sounds that make it look, feel, play, and sound like a brick brute forcing its way through air. Truly unique and engrossing. Flying bricks is the way to go, and would also help sell Infinity Battlescape as something different.
I’ve always favored the realism, but fudged for gameplay.
My vote goes for shields give you lift, otherwise treat it like it is shaped.
Edit: Also, lulz at the arguments for years of "these ships are in space, they don’t need to be shaped like airplanes"coming full circle all these years later.
I don’t think an artificial lift formula like in the early prototype is needed.
Currently the ships have much superior characteristics than most modern vehicles do. But I understand that people want more. People want to be able to have controll over the glide of ships even when supersonic. Like the Space Shuttle. Less struggle/more fun.
I think adjusting the aerodynamic shape to be a little more aerodynamic will drastically lower the needed angle of attack to deflect ship vector. From brick to cone(like) for example. If banking is really wanted, a wedge.
Like ICBMs Rentry vehicles. Those have exceptional great supersonic abilities.
I also oppose anything like “banking to turn” at least not anywhere near E:D levels.
This is how rocket engines work in reality. A nozzle for an engine is tuned to a specific pressure and when the rocket exhaust is over or underexpanded will reduce the thrust imparted on the vehicle. This is just the physics of hot gasses exiting a nozzle so as long as the infinity spacecraft don’t use propellant-less thrusters you can use this excuse to reduce performance in atmosphere. For a drastic decrease in performance I would just handwave that the engines are electrical in nature rather than chemical. At our current tech electric engines do not work in atmosphere due to the energy and difficulty needed to maintain controlled plasma in a non-vacuum and you could argue that the increased energy cost decreases the thrust available.
As for lift. I like the idea of shields generating a lifting surface but it sounds really complicated to implement. I’m all for whatever makes the best gameplay balance because at the end of the day this is a game. As others have mentioned I also think this is somewhere in the middle of realism and arcadey. As long as the smaller ships are more maneuverable, thruster characteristics are changed from their vacuum stats, and maybe have a slight change from more -> less maneuverable when you lose shields I think it will be a good spot. Just make the shield geometry an egg shape and make the non shielded variants slightly better than bricks head on. Let us test from there and see which way to tweak the numbers to something that feels good.
Well, this poll has really cleared things up… (Still a 50-50 split!)
This means we have to test both!!!1!
Preferably a temporary keypress lets us switch between two different models. 
I think the race track in the canyon of the current prototype has shown well enough that the current flying brick physics don’t work well when it comes to having fun flying around. The ship just feels really uncontrollable, like a car with a locked steering wheel.
The constant jousting in atmospheric battle was another indicator that it just doesn’t work well. I actually stopped flying at all at some point and just began shooting the opponent while he was jousting past me.
What do you prefer in the Steam Reviews:
“Ship feels really uncontrollable, I keep crashing into things.” or “For gameplay reasons its not a 100% simulation when it comes to flight physics”
Whichever you think is easier and more fun to fly Flavien.
Justification for almost anything can be handwaved away and will be accepted by the vast majority of players. I’d be willing to guess that a simulated lift system will fly better, and can easily be justified by using thrusters to give additional lift in an atmosphere.
Emphasis mine.
A real aeroplane is also a flying brick at speeds too low to produce lift.
I say implement actual physics, then tweak the shape of the ships’ aero-model to make it more airfoil-like as desired.
(By aero-model I mean a separate much simplified 3d model of the ship that would be used for the aerodynamics calculations)
I am on the “de-correlate aerodynamics from shape and blame shields for it” train.
The current flight model on planets is just not fun because the momentum is so strong that we end up jousting endlessly.
The solution to that would be either making the ships much more powerful so that direction changes are much more instant or have them behave more like planes.
Dogfights like we know them from star wars and the like, all only work with a flight model that resembles that of planes.
One example for me was the botched star citizen presentation recently. You can see in the video that the ships on the planet based fight basically stop moving and it just becomes and shooting range because moving around doesn’t really makes you less shootable and instead make aiming harder with no real benefit.
In space this is different because you can get out of range in all directions and the environment (asteroids, stations etc.) Offer way more line of sight breaking spots.
I think planet based combat should focus more on maneuverability and flying abilities and space should focus more on tactics, countermeasures etc… Having the awesome newtonian flight model like right now in the prototype in space and a more plane-like flight model that is explained by shield shapes enabling aerodynamic steering on planets would make this the best solution IMO.
I’m for a realistic model, a spaceship must have vertical thrusters powerful enough to lift the ship from the surface so let the ship central computer use them (and other thrusters installed on the ship) to turn/flight it in the atmosphere.
Conventional terrestrial aircrafts use aerodynamic shapes, wings and flaps to be able to stay in air, gain height and turn because they don’t have thrusters all over their body like spaceships.
But the design of the spaceships doesn’t fit that idea at all, the trusters are tiny on the ship exept the forward thrusters. Curently the models don’t look plausible to enable thruster based hovering on gravitational bodies such as earth.
This has to be handwaved anyway. If the ship design doesn’t adhere to realism forcing a ‘realistic’ flight model on these ships would make even less sense because then we would have to treat them like rockets and land them like falcon-9 stages with their main thrusters aimed at the ground.
Vertical thrusters MUST be sized appropriately to enable hovering, if not how do you suppose to land and take off from land bases? (Falcon-9 like take off is off the question)
If you ‘fake’ the flight model, how do you suppose to take off from land bases? Even if you fake aerodynamics with shields we don’t have wheels to accelerate enough with main thrusters to get a vertical lift.
Currently we are able to hover just fine. The issue is with overcoming momentum while maneuvering at high speeds, not fighting gravity.
But they are not. We have to assume that either the tiny vertical thrusters are extremely powerful or there is some apparatus inside the ship that delivers upwards thrust.
That was never in question. All I am saying is that the ships don’t look like they were designed to look as plausible and realistic as possible so why should we insist that the flight model is as realistic as possible when the ships don’t even do that.
Take off / Hovering =/= rapidly changing vector
As far as I can tell the question is: Do INS put fake thrusters on the ships to simulate aircraft flight, or do we simulate true atmospheric forces and fake the ship aerodynamics? I’m leaning towards the latter but it sounds like it needs to be a bit of both.
@Playbenni you mentioned a desire to make jousting/turretting less common/possible.
Achieving this would require not only enabling swoopy lift-based manouvres, but disabling the rotation and hovering facilitated by thrusters.
Vertical thrusters of an F-35B are also small, but still, they provide enough thrust to handle “maximum takeoff weight of 60,000 lb (27,000 kg)” (from wiki).
27,000 kg of force plus some aerodynamic drag is enough to turn the ship while in flight, not fast as with wigs but enough. A spaceship fighter is not designed to be as good fighter in the atmosphere as it is in space.
