Atmospheric Landings

Sidewinder atmospheric planet — Sidewinder above an atmospheric planet

"Atmospheric Landings" is the conjectural name for Planetary Landings that take place on planets and moons with atmospheres. The ability to land on worlds with tenuous atmospheres up to 0.1 atm was added to Elite Dangerous by the Elite Dangerous: Odyssey expansion, and requires the Advanced Planetary Approach Suite module which automatically replaces the Planetary Approach Suite after installation.^[1]

Overview[]

ED-Odyssey-Desert-Planet-Cobra-mk3 — A Cobra MkIII flying above an atmospheric world in *Elite Dangerous: Odyssey*

Elite Dangerous: Horizons added Planetary Landings to Elite Dangerous, allowing players to land on airless planets and moons with their ships and explore them via Surface Recon Vehicles and later Ship-Launched Fighters. While this opened up a vast new area of exploration and gameplay, Planetary Landings notably excluded all bodies with any type of atmosphere, or "Atmospheric Landings" on Terrestrial Planets, Metal-Rich Bodies, Ammonia Worlds, Water Worlds, and Gas Giants.

ED-Odyssey-Atmospheric-Planet — Planet with tenuous atmosphere

On June 3, 2020, Frontier Developments announced Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, and the pre-alpha trailer confirmed that Atmospheric Landings would be one of its key features. It was later clarified that Odyssey would only permit landings on atmospheric planets with tenuous or thin atmospheres up to a limit of 0.1 atm. This meant that the game would be improved to display atmospheric effects on applicable worlds, but the existing Planetary Landing flight model would not need to be reworked, nor would a new flight model need to be introduced to portray aspects of atmospheric reentry such as aerodynamic heating and drag. Enabling landings on tenuous atmosphere planets increased the total number of landable bodies in the game's galaxy by 20%.

Development[]

On December 14, 2012, David Braben explained the development plan: “What I want to see down on the planet is interesting things, cityscapes, even animals, live trees, being a big game hunter. All of the things that we’ve been very ,very excited about for a long time, we want to be able to realize. The amount of work required to create those things is so huge we want to do it properly. What’s really important is we do each of these things really well. So that sort of thing won’t be included on day one. We don’t want it to be a dull experience where you just go down, you get essentially exactly the same experience wherever you land." “we’ve designed the game with that capability in mind going forward and at a later date we’ll gradually add more functionality to allow you to do that and the game’s richness will gradually increase."^[2]

Newsletter #29 confirms, "Accessing richly detailed planetary surfaces," is a part of the development plans.^[3] Newsletter #32 confirms, "Major new features will include planetary landings and even walking around inside ships, stations, and planet surfaces with time."^[4]

In 2016, during an AMA with David Braben, this question was asked: "Is there a small team doing any preliminary work on atmosphere landings / walking (in stations etc) currently being looked at? As it is almost there for walking in station..." Braben said, "Yes. We have ongoing work on planets, including atmospheres, planetary life, walking about and lots of other very exciting things for the future."^[5]

During a Charity Livestream, David Braben commented that atmospheric planets won't be coming "anytime soon".

On June 15, 2017, community manager Dale Emasiri wrote, "Having spoken to our team at E3, atmospheric landings remains something we are still working towards and the whole studio, including David, is very keen to implement. We'd like to be able to give you an idea of the rough timeframe for it, but unfortunately that’s not possible at the moment - we don’t want to make potentially empty promises to you."^[6]

On June 3, 2020, Frontier announced the Elite Dangerous: Odyssey expansion, which would enable landings on atmospheric planets and moons. It released on May 19, 2021.^[1]