Do we actually *need* atmospheric shielding?

[FluffyFreak]

"Do or do not, there is no talk" - Yoda-ish

[FluffyFreak]

My personal take is that no we don't "need" atmospheric shielding as such but that it makes a sort of sense we've just not utilised it very well so far.

The aerodynamic craft should be able to travel faster through atmospheres and be more maneuverable within an atmosphere.
So far we haven't had any kind of flight dynamics except Newtonian, partly because of the autopilot issues it might introduce but if we let the autopilot just use the Newtonian methods and allow manual flight to use lift, drag, etc then that could be one way out of the impasse.

The other thing is that ALL craft are atmosphere capable in the year 3200. So long as their engines are powerful enough they can descend or ascend slowly and carefully enough that drag and heating aren't necessarily big issues.

Brick designs like the DSMiner need drag, lift and other coefficients defining for them, as do the sleeker designs and then this information needs integrating into the heating and drag models.

We have "shields" in the game so the idea of a system that does some mitigation of pressure or heating effects isn't too far fetched given the realms of possibility.

More likely is that there would be a range of projected energy shields that helped mitigate heating, friction, pressure or other things. As well as a range of modifications that could be done to the ships to allow them to visit various kinds of hostile worlds with acidic/corrosive atmospheres etc.

Sigh. The problem with atmospheric shield boils down to it rendering differences between sleek, atmosphere capable hulls like Wave and completely unaerodynamic bricks like DS miner irrelevant.
If a brick can have sleek atmospheric shield, then what point do hulls like Wave or Venture Star even have?

It doesn't eliminate it, you have a choice to use that cargo space or not, that is your game play choice of cargo space vs utility.
Also the problem is that we apply the drag and ehating effects equally to all ships regardless of their shape. So it's not the shield that's at fault, it's our data and the way we apply the effect in code.

So, instead of discussing if we should have it or not, why not fix the issue causing this.

• We need the code to be fixed to use some kind of drag coefficient.
• We need data modifying for each ship to give them drag coefficients.

That is how we fix things on this project, by moving forward.

Andy

[DraQ]

So far we haven't had any kind of flight dynamics except Newtonian, partly because of the autopilot issues it might introduce but if we let the autopilot just use the Newtonian methods and allow manual flight to use lift, drag, etc then that could be one way out of the impasse.

I think that no flight assist mode should ever override the physics - else we will end up with a cheap ED knockoff.

Still, autopilot generally tries to avoid atmospheres and compensates for existing extraneous forces (gravity and drag) so it might work no worse with more refined aerodynamic model, and it could use improvements anyway.

The other thing is that ALL craft are atmosphere capable in the year 3200. So long as their engines are powerful enough they can descend or ascend slowly and carefully enough that drag and heating aren't necessarily big issues.

True, but if we add more exciting things to do in and around atmospheres, it might make things interesting and atmospheric performance relevant. For example if we can doctor circumstances (through mission design) where player will end up in low planet orbit, and get attacked there, the atmospheric performance might be the factor deciding how player can skew the odds in their favour - if they can handle reentry better than the attackers, they may try dipping in the atmosphere, if the planet is a massive gas giant and player has advantage of thrust and/or lift, they may try to get deep enough so that the enemies won't be able to compensate for gravity and will be forced to break off or crash, if the planet is anything with dense atmosphere, player might try to use advantage of pressure resistance and so on. Then there is actual atmospheric combat.

For true deep space bricks, there is always the solution of also giving them thrust that's pathetic enough to not let them land on massive planets, but compensating with decent delta-v (so that they can still be good deep space non-combat vessels).
It's not like a *Deep Space* Miner is going to have much use for high thrust.

We have "shields" in the game so the idea of a system that does some mitigation of pressure or heating effects isn't too far fetched given the realms of possibility.

More likely is that there would be a range of projected energy shields that helped mitigate heating, friction, pressure or other things. As well as a range of modifications that could be done to the ships to allow them to visit various kinds of hostile worlds with acidic/corrosive atmospheres etc.

I can't really agree with that.

For starters, disrupting or deflecting an incoming projectile isn't all that hard and yet the shield generators burn through their stored energy really fast when facing incoming fire. A shield capable of keeping continuous stream of gases hitting the shield bubble at multiple km/s and plastering it with continuous wall of searing plasma trying to crush it and then melt the ship inside away for indefinite amount of time is inconsistent with established shield tech.

Second, limitations of fictional technology aren't just for realism nazis perverse satisfaction, they are what keeps fictional tech from tearing itself and the setting apart. For example, if we want a setting where having a hull, let alone an aerodynamic one has any point, we need to keep stupidly powerful forcefields sustainable for indefinite periods of time with relatively small generators out, because otherwise a ship consisting of a lawnchair, a generator and three shield bubles (one acting as hull, the other for hydrogen storage, the last one for containing fusion reaction) will vastly outperform any conventional design in all areas including cost efficiency.

If we are making semi-hard space sim, we should probably avoid situations where every kind of problem is solved by a different sort of energy shield, especially when evoiding that also gives us opportunity to tie all sorts of characteristics more intimately to the ship type.

It doesn't eliminate it, you have a choice to use that cargo space or not, that is your game play choice of cargo space vs utility.
Also the problem is that we apply the drag and ehating effects equally to all ships regardless of their shape. So it's not the shield that's at fault, it's our data and the way we apply the effect in code.

The thing is that if we make a shield worthwhile enough, then it will prevent further refinements in our aerodynamics mechanics to be visible to the player most of the time, because any player getting near any sort of atmosphere will have a stupid piece of equipment overriding their, possibly brick-like aerodynamic profile with an optimized one.

Then, there is the matter of making reentry and atmospheric flight serious business which is undermined by sufficiently advanced propulsion (which we do need for our gameplay) and we don't need it further undermined by special equipment.

So on one hand we want a shield that is more powerful than the current one, because current atmospheric shield is rather pointless, and on the other, the current one is already too much when it comes to its effect on aerodynamics and we need something weaker.
This does not compute.
The set of equations has no solution.
x<1 && x>1

Sure, we can make the ships heat more in the atmosphere, but we don't have much room before it gets stupid by making our craft burn up at velocities that should have no adverse effects on a cardboard box.

Or we can (sadly) discard the separate atmospheric shielding like the team did with many things before (including a while load of models and other content).

That is how we fix things on this project, by moving forward.

Sometimes you also need to rethink stuff.

At least if we're no longer content with blindly remaking Frontier.

[bszlrd]

A little bit of interesting thing in favour of atmospheric shielding: Magnetohydrodynamic Aerobraking