Flying Mutations + Flying Vehicles

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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With work being done on helicopters and improved Z-level traverse-ability, I want to know if this will also potentially mean changes to flight mutations. Which prior were simple gliding methods preventing you from falling to your death; implemented like so due to the current setup for Z-levels right?

So if flight for vehicles becomes a thing, will this mean changes as well to other methods of flight? Aside flight mutations, maybe jetpacks for Aftershock?

Sorry, getting ahead of myself there.

On am unrelated topic; will there we limits to how far/high we can flying?

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it is unlikly for a creature the size of a human to fly much less take of on it’s own espessially while encumbered by equipent. so unless we change these mutantion trees to include the small en tiny mutations and don’t wear/carry anything i don’t see how you would realistically fly. that said the trade of of being very weak and not able to carry a lot of thing might be worth it since you can escape any situation while outside by dropping everything and flying away, not to mention the increase in mobility and the scouting being very easy and non-risk. and even if you aren’t able to fly it might still be cool/realistic for a human sized creature to be able to activaly glide using your wings if they jump from a high position and aren’t to encumbered. you would also be able to jump much further and higherthan a normal human since your jumps are wing assisted so jumping on top of a roof from street level might be feesable while jumping multiple tiles away is also a option.

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Flight mutations are not going to make it into the game. There was an attempt to add them in the past that was rejected with strong reasoning against it and any other attempts to add flight.

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Wow, those are some requirements for flight.

How OP would flight actually be? Last I checked, most loot is underground or in buildings. Easy escape from zeds is the point for Bird tree, but it is only logical to fly when you have nothing on.

IMo tiny, frail, hollow bones and a strength malus could be a start. Maybe even make the bird wings into arm mutation, where you still have hands/claws on the ends (stretching here) which causes a significant crafting speed reduction and no top. Full nudist theme mutation tree? (Rimworld yo).

But I think it is still will be deemed not enough I guess.

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Thought it was only a technical issue, didn’t consider the logical ramifications, sorry.

But that does bring up other questions then. Like if we dictate logic to mutations then how does tentacles work? I mean the mutation based on that of cephalopod righ? Which I think is primal aquatic? Can something like that then be supported with the ability of land traversal?

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Maybe something like this? Or

this
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Seen that, a that makes sense from the movement side of things. It’s more of a question of weight. I don’t think tentacles from a celahopod have bones, more over the muscle structure for any form of land movement. Yet I can assume its thanks to the blob that these have been altered to allow as such?

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Flying Mutations will be fun runing out of stamina and falling 100 meter to your dead …mhhh FUN

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Heh, absolutely. A only being able to carry about a satchels worth of loot.

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it might be illogical to add flying mutations but jet packs could be added.

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oof, combine wings with tiny and hollow bones and it would be plausible. I definetly understand the balance reasons though.
But if it were for some reason added, I would recommend a flight weight requirement of 40 ish pounds or lower, INCLUDING YOUR OWN WEIGHT. The heaviest flyers today can get to 45 pounds (great Bustard), and i imagine that the player isn’t mutating into a pure flyer so even less weight than this would be realistic.
the weight requirement at this level would severely hamper how much equipment you could have and if you could ever fly in the first place.

the weight requirement would make it so you’d need traits like tiny and hollow bones just to try to fly, and the current wings in the game would either need another mutation to allow flight or even less weight (IE, impossible), as bug wings would not let you fly unless you were only a degree of magnitude lighter than with bat or bird wings.

require additional traits like a keel and you’d have a reasonable way to introduce flight via mutations.

if that’s not enough, slap on a 20% metabolic increase, flight costing stamina instead of just calories, etc.

but i don’t understand much about game balance as much as I try.

edited mass to weight, as pounds is not a measurement of mass.

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Sorry but if you can rationalise this through “blob did it” then you can do the same with flying mutation. And many other “unrealistic” things you can think of.
Why do we even talk about “realism” in a game, that has mutations of the kind, making it possible to (half-)change in various silly things and function, in the first place.
In general the game has a lot of unrealistic things, and to be honest, trying make it realistic is… unrealistic in itself.
Balance on the other hand, that might be a very legitimate reason not to include flying mutations (nor Jetpacks). ’
I guess its an option for a possible mod. Maybe. If someone would be interseted in such thing.

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The Blob isn’t making human sized things fly, hulk smash not withstanding. The Blob is mutating corpses and commandeering existing nervous systems to make them do mostly what they could do before. The blob also has the excuse of being extradimensional, so it gets away with its reanimation and mutation.

But in this dimension, someone with wings is just a person with wings, and we’re really quite too dense to do the whole biological flying thing. Even the largest flying-capable bird I know of, the royal albatross, weighs less than 10kg. Your average person weighs like, 60kg, and can easily exceed that with obesity or muscle mass.

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slap the tiny and hollow bones mutation on there and suddenly we are talking about a completely catagory of creature

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That’s an arbitrary statement though, we would have to quantify how much of a reduction we would expect from those, along with the implied consequences. Being tiny would presumably reduce wingspan, and hollow bones don’t affect the density of the rest of the body. The human skeleton is only around 15% or so of our mass, so even if hollow bones cut that in half, your saving a few kilograms. That doesn’t get you anywhere near to flight.

Birds are very specialized animals, select avian traits are unlikely to confer their one major advantage, which they’ve sacrificed an immense amount for over their evolution.

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I don’t want to pour fuel into this heated discussion, but I’d like to offer a new (semi-scientific) view.
The argument I read the most on here is about birds and comparisons of the heaviest bird capable of flight (kori-/great bustard), or with the highest wingspan (royal albatross) to a human.
However, I think we should take a look at the insect world… Let’s talk about the “bumblebee paradox”:
Bumblebees are able to fly, even though it (supposedly) contradicts aerodynamic rules.
From the information I’ve found about this paradox, “the bumblebee has a wing area of 0.7 cm² and a weight of 1.2 g”. Now, bumblebees can fly (obviously), and they do so by creating a small air vortex by flapping their wings over 200 times per second.

Now, if we take a average, muscular human (80 kg) and project the bumblebee data onto it, a human should be able to fly with a wing area of 4 ⅔ meters, which seems doable (2 wings, approximately 1.2 meter by 2 meter; or 4 wings…), even more so with the reduced bone weights from the bird mutation line.

Now, because a large beeing burns much less energy in nearly all activities than a small one, it would be exhausting, but wouldn’t straight out kill a human attempting flight.
(Do we have a entomologist here who can confirm/correct these statements above about bumblebees and calculate their calories intake so we can map it to a human?)

However, flight itself and flight time would still depend on a lot of things, where the main ones are probably weight (body as well as items/clothing) and strength, given that we have a fixed wing span/area. Both would also directly affect flight speed. Additionally, there are: Temperature (of the body and the environment), stamina, metabolism speed, pain and damage (and probably even more).

I’m not stating that there should be flight implemented. Especially for balance reasons it seems overpowered (even though at that point in game you probably already have a lot of other overpowered stuff :grinning: ). All I’m saying/writing is, it is thinkable, just not necessarily in the bird mutation category.

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Unfortunately, Bee propulsion wouldn’t work either, because we are not at a scale where we can treat air as a thick fluid, which is one of the things that allows a bee to fly how it does. The first response to this Quora question answers the premise pretty clearly.

I’m also pretty sure that even if we handwaved it and assumed the physics would scale up, flapping a 2m wing 200ish times a second would probably shatter every bone along it, hollow or not, and the friction burns would be brutal.

The game does try and follow the basic laws of physics, realism is one of the game designs. Its one thing to fictionalize a chemical compound that rewrites DNA or microcompact cybernetics, all of which are theoretically possible if impractical to manufacture/install/use. Its another to assume a person can behave like a bee :stuck_out_tongue:

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I feel that balance wise you can apply a strong stamima drain on the act of flying.

Everytime you go up, it drains about 1/3 of your stanima if you simply move in the air then that cuts down to 1/6 of your stanima. Plus add a great accuracy hit so this can’t be used to reliably take out enemies.

So with the risk of falling and a very drained stanima bar, you’d be at a sever risk of death. Forcing the tactics of using flight only for means of escape and when there are elevated positions you can reach to.

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Wait, how does a super sized bee fly?

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Realistically everything about a giant bee is ridiculous. That being said, it is apples to oranges. Comparing giving power to the player to the existence of a monster in the universe is very different.

At the end of the day, the player currently cannot fly, and to make the player fly, we would have to justify the how, as the things the player is capable of doing are generally constrained to the realm of realism, and those that currently aren’t tend to get knocked down to a more suitable level, such as nutrition or healing.

Its not a matter of finding the right ‘game balance’ point, its about finding an anchoring point in reality to determine the stats ‘objectively’, much like how explosives were reworked with shrapnel and guides on how to calculate what is ‘right’ based on reality. The problem with flight is that reality says a human cannot fly, and all the plentiful math hopeful people have done over the centuries to try and make the dream a reality has just shown how screwed we are in making that happen :stuck_out_tongue:

And before this gets rebuttled with “but X crazy tech or Y crazy thing”, thats not an argument to add more crazy, thats an argument to remove or rebalance the X or Y element if they don’t make any fundamental sense.

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