They used a big airbag in 2010... called a "ballute" I think...

What about a couple different Atmospheric Systems?

There is already Shielding and a Fuel Scoop... how about Atmospheric Thrusters? Why use up your precious reaction mass when you just need to dump reactor output into a Jet Engine or power up some ducted fans?

That way you could even further differentiate the Aerodynes... maybe the Wave (as a random example) has amazing atmospheric performance but can only put out a quarter G in vacuum? High impulse low thrust plasma drive... honking big Nuclear Ramjet...

Id love to see glowing hulls when reeneter atmospheres

Just poking around, got a few sketches and blender mockups in the works on a new ship, a Jovian Cruiser... using a few tricks from this article, some that I'd heard of before and some that open up interesting possibilities for trans-atmospheric ship design.

http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/miles/rmdocs/Conference%20Proceedings/2005_AIAAReno_0561_Miles.pdf

OK, so I'm getting closer and closer to a model I'm happy with, but I've actually already got a standard cockpit module that I think would make sense as a standard in-game... a 2 meter sphere. I don't have the inside modelled but I figure it would have something like this, a Linear Seat from UC Gundam.

As to whether a panoramic convex display would be better than a VR headset for the outside view... well... either would be better than a bit of reinforced glass in terms of visibility and safety! 😉

Really struggling to be coherent today so sorry if this is a bit rambling.

I really like this idea, being in an enclosed pod within the structure of the ship as opposed to being a "glass" bubble.

The Gundam example above is a bit odd to my eyes because I'd prefer the pilot to be really enclosed. In my mind it's not so much a seat but just the helmet visible and much more enveloped as though they're inside a suit that is itself already partially within an escape pod that just protrudes into the flight control space. A bit like the ejection pods on some USAF bombers, but obviously more high tech and sci-fi 😉

The environment itself wants to be HardAR or full VR like the Oculus Rift but with the tech' available in 1200 years time.

So some blending between all of those ideas to give a cool looking sci-fi futureistic cockpit / flight chamber 🙂 that's my ideal.

It's also a matter of protecting the pilot from acceleration, a free floating spherical cockpit will orient itself according to how the ship is moving, a human body can take a lot more Gs in certain directions than others. There's the armour and radiation shielding argument as well, a sphere encloses the largest volume for a given surface area so you can have more protection for the same mass, unfortunately you need maximum (convex...) surface area on a Spacecraft to radiate waste heat so a sphere might not be ideal for actual spacecraft hulls, especially at larger sizes due to the square / cube law.

I think 2 meters is ample for a single crewman and figure multiple crew would be compartmentalized into their own independant modules for survivability, but there are also decent arguments for larger ships either having larger multi-person "bridge" modules or multiple independant "cockpit" modules for each crewmember.

Using a standardized, self contained cockpit module also greatly simplifies the design of a standard Escape Pod...