COMBAT: HowTo For Advanced CMDRs - Improve Time On Target With Flight Assist Off - #00038

In ancient 1980s earth's aviation a new term emerged: Fly by wire.

Decades later, people did still not realise that this term coined more than exchanging hydraulic fluid lines between controls and rudders by electric signals attached to remote motors.

In Elite Dangerous, something similar happens every day. People take it for granted that moving their control organ of choice will make their ship move into a desired direction.

Speaking in miracles? Read on.

With Flight Assist ON, which is the default mode you start in Elite Dangerous, your ship's computer eases the pain of steering an inertia ridden high mass object through space. You simple 'steer' somewhere and your ship's computer does its best to bring you there.

For the following instructions, you should sit in your ship-of-choice. If you got several ships to use from, use the one with the least amount of agility. The one you constantly swear about being a 'fat pig' or similar. Do not use an Eagle, a Diamondback Scout or a Vulture. Especially not so if they're light or equipped with engineered thrusters ;-)

Prerequisites

You need to have your 'Flight Assist' Switch at hand. No matter if you use a keyboard & mouse setup, a HOTAS, dual sticks or a neural interface (sic!), you should be able to toggle between Flight Assist ON and OFF with a single key stroke. For setting this up, use main menu -> options -> key bindings and search for the Flight Assist setup. Assign a key or a button and switch from 'pressed' to 'toggle'. It is easier to use toggle mode for most. If you can't live with that, you can use 'pressed' but you will create an inconvenience for yourself with most setups, especially when using larger ships.

Get into your ship and place yourself about 10 km from a full size orbital station. Best is you go 'up' or 'down' from the station's approach path as you don't wish to risk collisions with cops or other traffic.


Phase 1: Vectors

The first thing you have to understand is the vectors thing. A vector is basically the path your space ship follows if you stop doing anything. Imagine you got a 100% power blackout with no thrusters. Where does your ship go in that given moment?

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