SpaceSimCentral

I'd really love an animation where scanners retract automatically when entering an atmosphere, because in real life those things get ripped from the fuselage due to dynamic pressure and/or provide unequal parasitic drag that could make a craft yaw uncontrollably. We don't see jets or airliners with such a dish flying around. Only the AWACS but they use a large aerodynamic disk. The rest of the (phased array) radars are behind nosecones or rearcones. The rotating spiked antennas on some of the models look like the early radars on the WW2 nightfighters like the Heinkel He-219 and Messerschmitt Bf-110 G4. Not exactly what you'd expect of 31st century technology.What I mean to say is those things don't look very convincing to future users who never played FE2 or FFE and don't understand it's legacy.What do you guys & gals think?

feel free to develop new models and put them into game

There's one way you could do this right now, and thats to stow these instruments when the landing gear is down.They would just have their positions scaled by the getarg(whatever gear is). Its all down to the model builder.A better way would be if the ships .lua file could track hull temperature from the atmosphere and automatically stow the equipment based on that.

Allow me to wander off-topic for a moment...Yeah, they get around the drag somehow. Probably by not sticking it out into the relative wind.

s2odan wrote:
A better way would be if the ships .lua file could track hull temperature from the atmosphere and automatically stow the equipment based on that.
Atmospheric pressure is available.

Quote:
Atmospheric pressure is available.
Do you mean for use in the .lua? But a reason I said hull-temp is because it only raises when the ship is travelling fast through the atmosphere, so when stopped the equipment would fold back out.

So when the scanner retracts, by whatever trigger, do we lose its functionality? That would make atmospheric battles even more interesting.

s2odan wrote:


Quote:
Atmospheric pressure is available.
Do you mean for use in the .lua?
If necessary. Rob has made it clear that if we need something, it will be made available.