@hrobertson I’m actually in the middle of reimplementing the atmospheric flight model right now. I think it’s a huge improvement over the older models, but I’m facing an issue: I’ve balanced it to fly the interceptor through the atmosphere, and it feels pretty good, but then when I tried the bigger ships ( even corvette, but capships even more ), they were basically unplayable. If I adjust the variables so they become playable, the interceptor no longer behaves well. So I’m juggling with all the parameters at the moment, hard to say where I’ll end up once it’s done
I haven’t worked on lift yet, most of it is about drag and friction. I somehow doubt lift generated by capships would allow them to fly: I suspect the lift force would be negligeable compared to their mass. And if you increased lift artificially so that capships could fly, then smaller ships such as the interceptor would behave in a strange way. So to answer your question clearly: I have no idea, but I’ll be sure to experiment
Well I like the sound of that. Let them enter atmospheres at their own risk. They larger capships should be beasts to handle in an atmosphere. In my opinion their primary role for planetary attacks should probably be bombardment and holding the “high ground” to protect the interceptors and bombers that attack ground targets. They would be sitting sucks for s2a missiles.
Sounds pretty realistic actually! Bigger ships should have a really hard time in atmospheres if they go too fast and aren’t aerodynamic. It should be a nail-biting experience!
This would end up favouring bombing runs by small craft on ground bases, compared with fleet attacks on stations. That sounds like good gameplay design to me!
The brave souls that try capital bombardment of ground bases though… That could be quite effective if they succeed because of the greater weapons power!
There is only a problem if occasions of pilot error are too common. If the gameplay assumes that capitals will be operated in atmosphere, but players are regularly losing them there, then either the feedback being provided is insufficient or the capital/atmosphere interaction is too unforgiving.
Can you implement proper aerodynamics? Lift and drag curves? The lift and drag curves of an interceptor should work pretty much like a jet, while those of a capital should be quite different. Capital lift should be a flat line for the most part, and drag should start out bad and only get worse as a greater surface area is presented at higher angles of attack.
From there, work in some blunt body equations to deal with heating.
Ship handling in Atmosphere can be balanced this way. Yes.
Even with the game handling aerodynamics realistically the ships can be balanced by changing their shape and power output in atmosphere. Explaining it away with different efficiencies of engines and different aerodynamic influence of shields.
If the shield helps aerodynamics by reducing friction / damage, then the ship will start to behave like in space, which defeats the original purpose of having ships behave in a different way in atmospheres than in space. So we have to walk a thin line…
Well there was always that idea about having the shields shape themselves to be a big fat saucer to work as a lifting body and make banked turns viable in atmosphere.
The idea of using shields to explain aerodynamics seems like a dodgy one to me - shields are (probably) invisible. Therefore, I would feel a complete disconnect with the ship if it wasn’t flying in a way that it’s shape and design suggest it should.
In other words, if it looks like a brick, it should fly like a brick! And vice versa…
Maybe it’s alright. Let’s see what people think about this balance once Flavien drops the juggling balls.
The shield idea is a way to decouple the ships from realism. Allowing the devs a point where they can balance that does only influence ship behaviour per ship and only in atmosphere. Yes it kind of defeats the whole point of having realism. It is a thin line, yes. And I also want the ships to behave diffrently. Fun is also important though.
I also suggested there to be some visual feedback. Like thin visible layer of the shield when hit
by projectile or atmosphere.
Then perhaps shields should not be a passive layer of defense like they are in so many other games but an active module that consumes power at a certain rate… so pilots of larger ships who want to fly smoothly for a while would have to sacrifice the ship’s other capabilities somewhat. Also larger shields would consume more power, and unless they’re some sort of magic semi-permeable membrane, your own weapons and engine exhaust won’t be able to pass through. (I’m assuming it’s a bubble shield or a slim conical shield, not a skin-tapering shield as that wouldn’t help with aerodynamics)
One possibility to balance that is to make the ship much more detectable, via any mechanics in place.
Also what @Naiba suggested. Simply make the shields a slightly more aerodynamic shape than the ship they are protecting.
You could add a mechanic to allow players to make shields slightly more ‘extended’ to make for a more aerodynamic shape, at the expense of a larger hitbox and lower strength. It would make the ship slower, but more maneuverable. Perhaps have a toggle-able on/off system that allows for the ship to automatically change the values based on what the pilot is trying to do or have a micromanaging system.
Not a huge advantage, but enough so that an experienced player will know how to exploit these to make a corvette slightly more effective than a brick.
I would, however, wait until adding an effective anti-fighter/bomber weapon systems before fleshing the system out. Because the only ship that would really benefit the most from having more maneuverability in an atmosphere would be the corvette, and that only really would be useful when combating interceptors and bombers.
This isn’t about making the shields more aerodynamic than the ship to ignore the atmosphere, this is about making a big flat ‘stopping’ surface to allow for much tighter turns when pitching than you’d see with space combat. Totally changing up the flight model to where rolling and pitching rather than direct yawing is the default choice with atmospheric flight.
( And then having ships spin out when the shields drop under fire )
*You might even get some interesting consequences for this, like people choosing to shut off their shields temporarily in the hope of rapid turns from such an unstable flight.
I do just want to derail back to this for a moment. Does this mean we’ll see a greater emphasis on the Newtonian motion on capital ships? They have increased mass and less directional thrust (compared to the little fighters) - an effect we can already see in the corvette.
I’m starting to envision flying controls where the pilot must think ahead for the massive ships, perhaps even turning retrograde to decelerate. This could really differentiate between large and small ships and add extra challenge to the biggest ones.
Also, won’t this mean capital ships would accelerate in a single direction faster than any small ship could (disregarding warp)? Big ships in Battlescape would probably have to avert the trope of WWII naval battles in space, except when cruisers line up in orbit to bombard a land base.
Lowering friction will only really allow you to fly faster in atmosphere, but not turn differently. The idea of using shields is to present a larger surface area to generate greater lift/drag and decreasing the turn radius. This might also create an aspected shield target where you can shoot at a large area from a certain angle and still hit the shields.
Mechanically in the game, you could present the atmospheric model a different geometry than the ship’s current cube, though it may end up requiring a super large surface area in order to get the performance we want (without actually trying to run numbers). If that’s the case, I would introduce a shield layering concept. Multiple layers would act similar to bi-planes in that each wing presents the same surface area, but there are just more of them. You can cheese the mutual interference issues and just consider each layer to contribute a multiplicative effect for each one still holding.
Other methods might include actually letting players have some sort of control over the size of their shield’s surface area.
You’re right, but capital engines’ force probably doesn’t increase proportionally with mass depending on how the engines actually work. Larger chemical rocket engines historically produce more acceleration than smaller ones. Engines in I:B aren’t chemical rocket based, so the devs can do whatever they want to balance capital ship acceleration.
Still, if capital ship acceleration is merely the same as small ships, most battles would end up being quite distinct from Star Wars or many other space operas.
I’m confused. How can you tweak things to make it feel good when half your aerodynamic simulation is missing? Surely when you add lift that will change how ships handle?
Also surely the only things you should really change are the properties of the ships in which case adjusting one to make it feel good wouldn’t effect the others.
My assumption was that you’d implement drag and lift reasonably realistically, have simplified ship models to make the maths eaiser (eg main surfaces without small details) and then tweak stuff like the exact shape of these simplified models, the properties of the materials the ships are made of to adjust surface friction, and the amount of thrust produced by the engines at various atmospheric pressures.
If an interceptor is gliding through an atmosphere in a stable regime, then adjusts AoA, it sounds like in your current model it will just experience drag while the direction of it’s velocity would not change. If lift were implemented the direction of the ships velocity would change towards (depending on ship geometry) the direction the ship was now pointing - that would change the feeling of flight enormously.
Of course ships aren’t going to be gliding around unpowered, but at velocities greater than terminal velocity the effects would be even more pronounced.
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