New Shot of Tempest (as in, not a trailer screenshot or whatever) on PS4 Pro Website

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On the wings?   Do they touch the ground?

Yes and yes.  (Bush kinda covers the fourth one)

Cool shot of the Normandy SR-3!



Wait.

We are indeed exploring potentially dangerous places, but any act of exploration is inherently a matter of risk versus reward, and I would argue that the rewards of having Tempest on the surface - an instant highly defensible 'beach head' and mobile research base, which can be used as both living quarters and a laboratory for analysing any samples of the local flora and fauna, any artifacts, and so on, without constant shuttle trips back and forth - outweigh the potential risks, particularly when you consider that Tempest, as a military starship, will have far more effective armour, kinetic barriers and weaponry than any shuttle. It's an added risk, certainly, but Tempest simply couldn't perform her role - scout/research ship, intended to conduct planetary surveys in advance of the rest of the fleet - nearly as effectively from orbit, and so that risk is, in my approximation, worthwhile.

The reason we don't have a shuttle is that the designers of Tempest decided that the advantages of having a smaller ship that could easily operate within an atmosphere outweighed the potential advantages of having a shuttle, and having to enlarge the ship to fit the attendant support facilities. This would seem to be in keeping with Alliance military doctrine generally, as the one Alliance frigate we've actually seen - the SR-1 - did not, in fact, have a shuttle, and Tempest seems smaller still.

I'm really not sure what you're getting at with the points I struck through. Why would any of that have anything to do with whether landing Tempest is sensible or not?

Oh, and dismissing it all as 'rule of cool' seems a mite trite. (Though, in fairness, I'd hardly object even if that were the case--if it wasn't for 'rule of cool', there'd be no biotics, no faster than light travel, and no space battles in the franchise. Besides, as I pointed out, it'd be a 'rule of cool' that has been adhered to since the very first game with the SR-1, so it'd be a little odd to take issue with it now.)

(Psst, I updated the main post with a clean version of it, scrubbed from further down that Reddit thread.)

EDIT: Whoops, beaten to the punch. For the record, I don't actually know where it is on the official site; I just grabbed the picture from that thread, and there doesn't seem to be a link.

Ah, that explains why I couldn't find it; it's not on the UK site, and that's where Google sent me.

It's got 4 landing legs. Two are at each wing tips.

Hey, hey BioWare... Custom soundtrack options for our cabin's space iPod/clock? Pretty pweeese?

That looks badass, why didn't the trailer didn't do it justice?

It's appeared in the E3 2016 trailer and not just in the opening shot as far as I can remember. It can be seen flying on the desert planet.

It does. I thought it was a fighter for a second. Like an F-18 sized plane, I mean. lol It must be the perspective. 

I think it is going to be a pretty small ship, though. Given the size of the ramp, how much ship space is still available behind the top of that ramp, and the size of a Mako, I'm guessing the Tempest must be smaller than the first Normandy. 

Then again, it might be Bigger on the Inside. I mean, the layout of the SR2 had a glaring issue for me that never made any structural sense, so this being a seemingly small ship, but still being comfortable on the inside with multiple decks is totally a possibility.