While it may seem contrary to the body of this wall of text, I actually very much like the concept of Hover mode and what it could potentially add to the game. However, I feel its current implementation and the reasons for its implementation are flawed. A few quick definitions: VTOL is not an IFCS flight mode, but a physical mode of flight in a more academic sense, specifically the vertically-oriented beginning and termination thereof. VTOL Thrusters are thrusters designed to provide counter-gravity thrust in atmospheres. Hover is the IFCS flight mode that should preferentially utilize a VTOL flight model. All ships capable of landing in Star Citizen are designed, whether or not they have dedicated VTOL thrusters, to utilize VTOL as their primary means of doing so. I'll be kind and provide a simple outline of the points of contention: Hover mode needs to be a manual toggle. Not using hover mode should not automatically make a vessel fall out of the sky. Using Hover mode should not turn off Main and/or Retro thrusters for vessels that have separate VTOL thrusters. If a ship is physically capable of hovering in place with nose down via Retro + MAV thruster power, it should be able to do so. Ships with articulating thrusters should be able to utilize their full range of motion, whether in Hover or not. Coupled Hover mode should attempt to maintain level attitude, desired velocity, and altitude automatically (Quadcopter mode). Decoupled Hover should attempt only to maintain altitude and make no automatic corrections for velocity or attitude (Classic Helicopter/Harrier mode). Hover mode in general should limit, as it does now to some extent, the maximum attitudes of the vessel in order to maintain altitude and prevent undesired (lacking control input) descent. Manual Toggle and lack of absolute requirement Because of the difference with how Hover handles the vessel compared to normal handling, this changeover absolutely needs to have a manual change option. It might be a manual-only keybind, or it could be configured in an MFD screen, defining whether Hover is Manual or Automatic, as well as automatic transition altitudes and speeds. In any automatic transition, the Hover Exit speed should be only 10% more than the Hover Entry speed, to avoid fluttering, but also to avoid getting "stuck" in Hover mode with normal translations. Hover also needs to be not-essential. The vessel's IFCS should be advanced enough to determine exterior conditions, such as gravity and atmospheric pressure, and use its available programmed means to counteract undesired motion to the best of its ability. Supplying power to VTOL thrusters should not be reliant on a flight mode switch. Hover mode should be a safeguard against flying a vessel in an unstable configuration (such as belly-up or nose-down or sideways). While not essential to all vessels, it would still be a useful flight tool and more beneficial to larger vessels. It should also configure the "idle" state of articulating thrusters (think Prospector, Cutlass, Reclaimer, etc) to a downward orientation instead of fore-and-aft. In such a configuration, this would improve the response time of articulating thrusters in counteracting gravity compared to normal flight. Thrusters and Attitude First and foremost, the contention that ships hovering in the air, pointing nose-down, would be a significant and uncounterable threat to ground forces is, understandably, flawed thinking. While your vessel might have a stable platform to fire on ground targets, it's also a large target without any cover or defenses itself. The only vessels that might hover in the sky in such a manner would be smaller fighters, anyway, around and up to Vanguard size. Larger vessels would be unable to use this flight configuration stably and be making use of turrets for ground attack anyway. To this end, ground-based weapons should pose a significant danger to such small ships presenting themselves as an obvious and easy target. The Nova Tank and hand-held railgun (in addition to other anti-vehicular ground-based weapon platforms) should easily punch through the comparatively weak shielding of an Arrow or Aurora and cause substantial damage to its flight systems, preventing it from maintaining itself on station in such a configuration if it does not desire to crash at the very least. Therefore, Hover mode or any form of atmospheric flight should not turn off Retro and/or Main thrusters. However, because our ship thrusters are based on the concept of a VASIMR-type thruster, there is an easy solution: efficiency tuning. Certain thrusters are designed to work better in vacuum, and others are designed to work better in atmospheres. For dedicated Retro thrusters, we might say they can be half as efficient at 1 atmosphere. This means that, for a given amount of fuel flow (which we can maintain for Retros and Mains), these thrusters will only produce half as much thrust at standard atmospheric pressure compared to in a vacuum. We could ostensibly invert this for VTOL thrusters, making them function at full power in full atmosphere while only producing half as much thrust in space. MAV thrusters and articulating thrusters present a different circumstance, but it isn't insurmountable - variable fuel flow. To produce the same amount of thrust in atmosphere, MAVs and articulating thrusters would simply use twice as much fuel, which would in turn generate twice the amount of heat and wear. This extra heat production should, ideally, be mitigated by Coolers receiving a convection bonus to their cooling rates while in atmospheric conditions, based on pressure. Note that this is all dependent upon atmospheric pressure, not gravity. It should be mentioned that overall fuel consumption, at the moment, is prohibitively high as well, even without these changes. Finally, a power plant might not have enough power to simultaneously supply 100% power to VTOL as well as Main or Retro thrusters, but the IFCS should be intelligent enough to at least try to make the vessel behave according to the pilot's control inputs regardless of flight mode. Ships with Articulating thrusters might also have a sizable advantage, especially in Hover mode, as their maximum stable pitch and roll angles would be dictated by their thrusters' ranges of motion. A prospector might ostensibly be able to be perfectly still while pitched downward at 30-45 degrees with no significant difference in power consumption compared to being perfectly level. An Idris, even, might be able to hover in place while pitching and rolling, but its larger thrusters and large mass might dictate a smaller range of motion for its VTOL thrusters due to mechanical limits (i.e. most of the mounting systems on those thrusters would be designed to support mostly forward and upward thrust, not as much backward or even downward thrust, and the roll limits would be fairly narrow, between 5 and 10 degrees). Hover, as mentioned above, would simply tune the default "idle" configuration of these thrusters to the vertical instead of horizontal, improving response times and reducing the possibility of accidental crashing. Actual Hover Flight Model Coupled Hover should function more like an intelligent Quadcopter; with zero inputs, the vessel should attempt to maintain zero relative surface velocity, both laterally and vertically, as well as maintain pitch and roll horizon-level. This in effect would turn pitch and roll inputs into zero-order (or position-based) functions - a -50% pitch input would point the nose down to 50% of the altitude-stable range. However, the vessel would also utilize retro and MAV thrusters to maintain its position to the best of its ability, maintaining zero velocity and its position, given no throttle or strafe input. It may still drift about if it can't provide enough power to cancel lateral motion, but Hover primarily should limit range of motion to maintain desired vertical velocity. Throttle, as with normal flight, should still govern nose-foward flight velocity up to the full limit of the current speed limiter setting. Coupled Hover could also be seen as a kind of positional atmospheric hover-in-place autopilot. Decoupled Hover should function more like a Fly-By-Wire Helicopter, where thrusters are automatically adjusted to suit the pilot's input. Pitching forward without touching strafe up/down should make the vessel start accelerating forward, but not hurtling toward the ground. Returning to a level state would maintain this forward velocity, but not attempt to cancel it, while also maintaining altitude. Throttle would, as with normal decoupled flight, govern forward acceleration. Decoupled Hover might also be seen as an atmospheric cruise-control autopilot.