@INovaeFlavien And this is my main issue with how atmospheric flight currently works in the prototype. If pitch up, I want to feel the air pushing the underside of my ship upwards.
At the moment, it’s too similar to space flight with airspeed resistance.
I hope the new atmospheric model will improve this!
Yeah, I totally understand. But you won’t achieve much of that with a realistic ( hell, even semi-realistic ) flight model. Ships are bricks and have no lift surfaces / wings. Even the interceptor, realistically, has little lift surfaces. So in order to achieve the behavior you want, I need to cheat. I need to tweak and introduce non-realistic variables to the equations. That’s fine with me, but I want to make sure everybody is on board with that 
It does!
You have to have very high angle of attack. Such that you don’t see you vector indicator anymore. But the deflection works in the current model!
I support first trying out how bricks fly themselves in the new models before “cheating”.
Ah okay, I haven’t actually tested for a while! But it will still be interesting to see if the changes improve it.
I just feel like it’s too easy to turn and face in any direction during atmospheric flight, like I’m in space.
Should ships try to pull back to the travel vector in atmosphere?
Indeed it does. If you want to think of it in simple terms, it’s really just newton’s 2nd & 3rd law in action.
Air molecules striking a surface will impart momentum to it based on their mass and relative velocity. Like billard balls, if they strike the surface off-center, the molecules will deflect in one direction, while the surface deflects in the other (lift and drag vectors)…I believe this is how Flavien’s current model works by drawing ray-traces at the aerodynamic model for the object.
Since air molecules only have so much mass, and there’s a specific density for the atmosphere, they’re only going to be able to impart a certain amount of momentum (and hence force) on a body moving through them. The more massive the object moving through it, the less effect the atmosphere is going to have on it. The more dense the atmosphere, the more effect it has on the object (try flying through water). Also, the faster the object/air molecules, the more momentum is imparted (try flying through water extremely fast!).
If an object has a very large surface for air molecules to strike, then you get more force simply by having a larger volume of air that will hit your object. Changing the angle of attack does the same effective thing by presenting a larger surface area towards the free stream of air molecules.
In any case, if your object too massive compared to the number of molecules it’s hitting and the speed it’s going at, then it will just plow right through the atmosphere, and turning will have minimal effect (which is how it should work if you’re going waaay too fast anyway)
Our current suggestion with using shields for the flight model is to artificially change the surface area of the flight model i.e. make it to where more molecules hit the surface. I also suggested a layering shield model to multiplicatively increase the surface area without actually creating gigantic shield surface areas. This also has the effect of gradually lowering your maneuverability as your shields get weaker as opposed to a binary on/off effect with losing shields. The actual forward shape of the shields should help with drag models as well.
Newton’s 3rd is only responsible for a miniscule fraction of ‘lift’ in all regimes of flight except high speed low density:
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/wrong2.html
Let’s take this discussion over to the Atmospheric flight model thread.