Why not make the Val a pure hover based aircraft? Simply remove it being able to get out of hover mode and let it's flight be controlled by the tilt of the craft like a chopper. Having the Val be just another VTOL craft isn't going to make it stand out that much. As is all aircraft are all one form of VTOL. Some fast, some slow, but all fly the exact same with the hover mode and flight mode. Making the Val hover only wouldn't hurt its mobility at all, it would even help it in that area from giving so much more control to the crew. Able to fly backwards, sideways, or front to keep the craft able to have what side it needs exposed for the gunners to make use of. Side note. Why the hell is the cockpit so cluttered with bars? That glass is worse than a Reaver at being unable to see out of! Makes it so hard to fly as needed while in 1st person and almost forces you to fly in 3rd person. Id suggest removing the vertical bars and maybe, just maybe, lowering the screens a touch.
No thoughts? My thinking is to make the Val a chopper like aircraft. Holding space or W would boost the vertical thrust only, same with S and what ever the default decent key is. Pressing both gives a minor boost so that you could have an extra oomph when needed for fast dodging. But press nothing plus hold level and it goes into an even semi stable hover that will still move the aircraft as it tilts. Still gives options for both a hover and movement based cert lines as well. Hover certs would give better take off power for raw speed but not able to use it for mobility as that is linked to the space bar and not W. Thruster certs would make it have better mobility but costs speed. In general Id like to see a negative to the certs as well with the reason of if you are giving more power to one system, you are taking that power away from others. So you have stock middle ground, hover with higher speed but low mobility, and thruster with higher mobility but lower speed. Big down side in coding this would be fixing how stable things are when hovering. You can tilt most aircraft a good bit before they start to move and you have to be almost sideways before you can gain any kind of speed with pressing space. I also suggest a few more things. Giving it more heft. Make it almost as hard to tilt about as a lib to give it some more feeling. Give it more HP if this is the speed it is going to stay at. 2 rockets is fine but a 3 mag kill with a carbine? That's nothing in a fight! Think of a few heavies shooting at you. Or just a MCG! Limit the downward view of the rumble seats a touch. Lancers are going to be a PAIN with the Val. At least don't make it to easy for them to rain hell at max height. Give it an ammo cert line. Not vehicle ammo, infantry ammo! At max 1/4 the rate of an ammo pack and little to no range. You get paid while your passengers kill stuff. Win win.
How do you actually get it out of hover mode? I can't figure that out and thought it WAS purely a Vtol. Trust me when I say that being pure Vtol is going to get the thing absolutely destroyed. A single shot from an S1 takes 50% of its health. You DO NOT want to be going slow with this thing near the ground.
VTOL stands for Vertical Take-Off and Landing. Pure VTOL is what every aircraft in the game is already. All of them have downward facing thrusters and as they gain speed (W) the thrusters shift to face backwards giving forward thrust. Think Harrier jet for a real life example. Gain enough forward speed in the Val and the wings will turn just like all others. VTOL aircraft can hover but they are meant to be more jet/plane like with focusing on forward movement. What Id LOVE to see is a more helicopter based hovercraft where there is no forced forward movement. 100% hover based and no amount of speed will change how the craft flies outside of more speed = more inertia to counter for mobility. Without having to worry about what mode you are in you can do some rather nice fancy flying with nothing but vertical thrust. back when I played ARMA my flying a chopper was almost dancing as long as I didn't gain to much speed. Able to keep a side gunner on target while flying in any direction I wanted. I could fly backwards if I wanted to. Trying to do that with a PS2 VTOL craft isn't very doable once you get out of hover mode. And you can't gain speed without getting into flight mode as hover mode tends to make you come to a stop by default. As a hover craft the Val wouldn't be sitting still like a some other aircraft hovering in game. You will be always moving in what direction you want while facing where you want making leading shots rather hard. Think of a dome around a building, a hover craft can be at any part of that dome they want then move to any other part they want while keeping its front or side or back to the building. Add a bit of range and you should have any direction you want to dodge fire either it be up, down, left, right, forward, back, or a mix of any of them. All while keeping your gunner where he needs to be facing if you got the skill.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/..._get_some_confirmation_of_whether_the/cjpeesy Wait, the dev said that there is no getting out of hover mode. But I know I was able to change modes on the PTS when I played with it. The wings moved and everything to give a more focused forward movement. I might be pissing in the wind here. Off to the PTS to confirm things.
Just went into PTS and I am right, it is a VTOL craft with modes. Hold W and the Val will go forward to the point of ignoring pitch to a degree. Having my nose 40 or so degrees in the air while maintaining perfect forward movement with no climbing or dropping isn't a hover craft, that is an airplane. Try that is a chopper and you will climb plus drop speed FAST. If the Val is to be a pure hover craft then W should NEVER give forward movement. Make it an increase of vertical thrust only. More V-thrust the more you move with what angle the craft is at. Hitting space should be a booster if anything to help W that has little to no detailed control to it. As is the Val is not a hovercraft, but another VTOL craft.
Piloting air in this game is different because there is no actual consistent lift meaning you cannot properly drift which is what you want. On the other hand it does not act like a vtol either since they do have consistent lift in hover mode and can bank like an airplane when flying, neither of which air in this game does. On a side note its not true that there should not be forward thrust if the goal is to make air vehicles similar to helicopters most newer military choppers and many civilian have thrust engines these days in addition to their rotors. This is to allow level flight forward and yes much of its forward momentum is still achieved by tilting the nose down but not all.
The point is, This thing as is flies too slow. The second you get within 100m of the ground, EVERYTHING is going to tear it to peices. This thing literally flies slower than the tanks drive unless you point the nose at a sharp angle. Keep the nose level, then try to accelerate without pressing space. You are already dead.
I can't find one example of a rotor based aircraft with some kind of thrust engine, jet or otherwise, that isn't a TV show or something like that. Choppers use jet engines to power the rotors but it is still all about the rotors to control everything in flight. Everything I did find said that adding thrusters would harm the rotor blades by messing with airflow. Plus no rotor based aircraft that isn't a type of plane simply has the aerodynamics for that type of engine. They are just as different aircraft types that aren't compatible together. You confusing the exhaust ports for something else? Speed can be changed and the armor is weaker on the PTS than the devs want it to be. It's in the link I posted before. Plus if it had a proper drift of a hovercraft then you would never have to stop to give someone the chance to land an easy shot. You'd either be always moving or changing directions, that's the main perk of a hover based craft. Even if it is slow just being able to move in any direction at will is enough to make it damn hard to hit. Think Magrider levels but with being able to also go up, down, and EVERYTHING in between with not having to worry about fine aiming to keep return fire. It isn't suppose to be flown like other aircraft. For an ESF/Lib/Gal in hover you have 2 options. 1- use V-thrust to go up or, 2-turn then add forward thrust. For a hovercraft you just tilt in the direction you want and done. No waiting on engine power, no waiting on mode changes, no needing to adjust position first, just tilt and you move for every direction but up or down and the more you tilt the faster you go before adding power to the engines. With having a space bar booster. Plus with no weapon for the pilot he can 100% focus on flight as long as he gives one of the 3 possible gunners a shot. That being the bottom half of his 1st person screen (dashboard and down more or less) for the main gunner or either side for the rumble seats. The Val is going to be DEADLY with all that mobility and possible fire angles! The Val is SO close to being a hovercraft and the vehicle type I have wanted in PS2 since I started playing. It just needs to not be an airplane and not have any forced movement. Forced movement simply kills mobility and makes for some funky controls.
If you shoot the Phoenix from one of the bucket seats and the Valkyrie is moving at over 10 kph (so, pretty much anything but hovering) you'll shoot your own Valkyrie from within... NC, the only faction that can accidentally team kill 3 friendlies while ADS without a line of sight on said friendlies. Oh, this also happens on Harassers too (Though it only happens when you're in reverse on the harasser, or rolling backward, or falling, or turning sharply). The logical fix for all of these phoenix/collision issues is to remove friendly fire hit detection for a very short time (half a second should be sufficient) so that the shot simply passes through harmlessly, allowing you to steer your shot clear of your aircraft should your missile wind up looking at yourself. This would also solve the issue with hitting friendlies by accident when firing from crowded cover (Thanks to the missile technically being a "vehicle" according to the game engine, it also has the buggy vehicle latency issues. Meaning you can fire with a clear line of sight, then have a friendly walk in front of you, and still hit the friendly).
The easiest example to see is the apache the turbine engines on either side of the of the main fuselage provide forward thrust as well as turn the rotors. It is not designed to provide as much thrust as possible like a jet aircraft because that would indeed damage it, but watch video of one hovering the entire vehicle is tilted back slightly to compensate. And they are aerodynamic enough, as streamlined as any subsonic craft we are not talking putting a real jet on these things the apache max speed is 280 km/h hardly supersonic you could have it shaped like a brick and at that speed would not be fatal to the craft. I could also be wrong about how widespread it is but it is hardly science fiction.
This is getting off topic as all hell but I still gotta post. http://www.helicopterpage.com/html/jet.html The turbine engines used in choppers gives all of its thrust power into mechanical power to spin the rotors. If you did try and use the engine for thrust it would eat fuel like nothing else with causing harm to the craft. The way a chopper does level flight is just the shear amount of a control you have over the rotor blades. Skip to the 14 minute mark in the video below to see just how much control you have. You don't control the choppers body, you only control the blades giving the looks of a level flight but the blades are at an angle giving just enough for movement in the direction of choice. That being any direction you damn well please starting out. Then once you get into higher angles for the blades it starts to effect the body till at certain speeds where airflow forces the craft to face forward. By then you can just use the blades angle to keep moving while having the craft more or less level. That is the control type the Devs are going for when they said that they wanted the Val to be chopper like. Hover based flight would act almost exactly like that of a rotor based aircraft but at an EXTREMELY higher level of complexity. 100% downward thrust at all times or risk being ****** in more than one way.
I just read the reddit post confirming that the hover mode is working as intended. They've ****** it up in my opinion. All of the suggestions to make it better for troop transport are pointless if it's this slow, the galaxy will be superior in every situation. They just gave us a downgraded liberator, and since apparently the only resistance that isn't working is the one against small arms that means that sitting in the rumble seat is suicide in an area that has any flak at all (every hex in PS2). Congratualations SOE, you just disappointed me.
Damn, I always wished they would implement a near-ground-chassis for Liberators. I never actually thought about a pure hover system. That's pretty genius, now that I think about it. Whatever inadequacies it has right now, I want to test that! (3 days till back home again) Though yeh, an Afterburner is par for the course.
