Question: In the low gravity planets like Mars but with atmosphere.
in that configuration, the external payload would not be affected by the heat of friction during reentry?
Sure, but if at anytime we have such vessel in history I doubt they would reentry in any atmosphere (or land). (given we don't have antigrav)
Notice the front head cover completely the cargo area and the gravity wheel, one can consider that the temp would not be so high here.
Gear are a pure headeach to modelise, I calculated a mass of 4800 ton with fuel, even with six monstruous gear it make an huge weight per m2 on ground. Maybe only small moon of jupiter would see such vessel land.
In anyway doing realistic gear would take a lot ot time because it require many motion to deploy/stow such gear. So I'll bypass this now and they will only appear "plop". Sorry. (loosing time for poor result is something I must now avoid, the goal is car & cargo)
I finished the vessel bay, DGIV and XR2 fit perfectly in it. (XR2 can't grab UCGO payload yet, I don't know if doug want to do it, the C++ class is really simple, the UCGO Arrow use less than 10 lines of code to grapple/release cargo)
About FPS, I think it will be good (I always optimise all I can and I use ressources wisely) The arrow have 1/3 less poly than DGIV and 1/2 less texture. Cars have not much (usually 4000 poly, one or two 1024 textures)
Cheers
Dan