I went through the settings again and discovered some new ones and some good or bad interactions.
When I flew into a hangar and extended landing gear, I was still afraid of ramming into a wall due to the remaining momentum.
Now I understand how it works:
“Automatic slowdown” is what the ship does when landing gear is out.
But the problem with this is that it reduces thrust force – generally.
But if you turn that nasty “proximity assist” off (which could be useful when maneuvering close to stuff, but is poison for landings), then reverse thrust is no longer gimped but at full force.
If you have both settings enabled, then you can hardly brake properly, not even with boost.
On my 300i for example, it reduces 3.5 Gs of reverse thrust to 1.0 Gs in proximity and even just 0.6 Gs in landing mode.
“Automatic slowdown” does NOT reduce the thrust force, it is simply an enforced speed limiter that reduces your speed between 20 to 30 meters (based on the proximity assist results). Proximity assist itself does cut down the available thrust which from our perspective is not wanted at this time anymore.
The updated FM (which is the post-MM iteration that is currently in the works and which will be shipped along with the new quantum experience and control surfaces) has a few changes in that regard:
1) Proximity Assist has been rewritten from the ground up. Instead of acceleration limits the new proximity assist is based on only on adaptive speed limits. Based on several conditions (closeness to the environment, obstructions along the TVI, ship stability, etc.). proximity assist will contextually enable and cut down the max speed of your ship. That allows you to do very smooth landings or carefully manoeuver in tight spaces without using the speed limiter. Now before PVP sweaters go into shock here: contextually it only enables when you are manoeuvring carefully already (it will never enable during hard maneuvering) and you can ofc turn it off (there are two separate options whether your landing gear is in or out). You can also force it off by holding the boost button … so far in internal tests that works quite well.
2) The automatic slowdown option has been removed entirely because the new proximity assist takes care of that in a more flexible way.
We don’t have any dates when we can ship this out to players. As I said this will likely be coming along with the new quantum experience and control surfaces and those two are not yet ready for multiplayer.
