Developer Diary | Plane Designer

Today, we are taking a look at the Plane Designer. As always, any number value that you are going to see in this DD is subject to change.

The Plane Designer became a subject of discussion, both inside the team and in the community, almost as soon as we announced that No Step Back would feature a Tank Designer. We felt that it would mesh well with the rework of the Italian focus tree, not least because the Italian aviation industry was very well developed and produced some of the best combat airplanes of the war - hampered mostly, as Italy so often was, by lacking production capacity.

We also felt that a Plane Designer would help plug some gaps in the lineup of available aircraft. Over the years, many players have commented on the fact that many nations modified their fighters to also be able to carry bombs, or their tactical bombers to also carry torpedoes. One of the big goals of the Plane Designer was to allow for these types of multi-role aircraft.

At the same time, we didn’t want to make these multi-role planes too powerful. Instead, a plane design optimized for a single mission should still be more effective than a multi-role plane. Where multi-role planes offer flexibility, optimized designs offer top performance, if you can afford them.

The basics of the Plane Designer are probably not a surprise for anyone who is familiar with the Ship or Tank Designers. The base is called an airframe, which roughly corresponds to the hulls and the chassis of the ship and tank designers. The Airframes have a number of module slots, where you can put the modules that give the final design its actual stats. There are three different size classes of airframes: Small, Medium, and Large. Small planes also come in a carrier-capable variant of the airframe.

The types of module slots in the Plane Designer are slightly different from the Tank Designer. There are effectively only three types of slots: Engines, Weapons, and Special modules.

Engine modules are perhaps the most straightforward of them. Unlike tanks, where this slot dictates what type of engine the tank uses and a separate stat determines what its speed is, engine modules in the plane designer determine the number and power of the engines mounted on the aircraft. These engine modules produce a new stat called Thrust, while all other modules have another new stat called Weight. These two stats are effectively the limiting factor of what and how many modules you can put on the plane. A design is only legal if Weight does not exceed Thrust (some people might point out that the only planes with a Thrust/Weight ratio of 1 or better in reality are modern, high-performance fighter jets, but these people will be summarily ignored).

Any excess Thrust is converted into extra speed, which is intended to provide a reason not to fill every module slot.

One thing to note here is that jet engines (and rocket engines, for that matter) are part of these engine slots, which means that they are available for all types of planes. This, by necessity, means that Jet Fighters and other jet-powered airplanes are no longer their own unit type - they are now simply fighters with jet