How to fly your ship: Advanced

Flight Modes

If you are reading this page, it is assumed you are familiar with the original page how to fly your ship, and are looking for a little more help on more advanced control systems in your ship. If you are a brand new player, please see the page linked ^above for a starting point.

With that out of the way, let's get to the real meat of Advanced Flight Controls. You will remember from the original page that all motion in dV is relative to the player ship, as it would be viewed from the bridge. Additional information related to this is how to 'vectorize' your flight methodologies. Every course correction and attitude vector can be described by circles and triangles. Those familiar with geometry / trigonometry will find this quite simple, along with those familiar with Newtonian mechanics. For the remaining 94% of people, this page is for you.

Course correction is not like driving a car, mind you. Gravity bound transport operates in 1.5 dimensions (left, right, forward), and has advantage of friction with a surface, to affect course corrections. This is NOT true in the vacuum of space. dV gameplay and Newtonian mechanics operate, here, in 2 full dimensions (left, right, up, down). To make a course change from one direction to another, ALL energy in the original direction must be cancelled (sort of).

Using this guide

Each relevant section of this Advanced Flight Control guide will begin with a 'previously on' synopsis of the original simplified page, followed by more advanced usage techniques for each. The flight control systems in dV are quite robust, and all motion obeys Newtonian mechanics. As such, players can move in ways that *may* not necessarily be intuitive at first.

Full Manual

As previously mentioned, this is the most difficult flight mode to operate in, as it requires the player to pay full attention to the local region very closely. The first thing to note here is that many ships / loadouts are asymmetrical in mass. This means that if one draws lines bisecting the ship, there is a high probability that one quadrant will contain more mass than its' twin across the line of symmetry. This means that more energy will be required to move that quadrant, in relation to the other, which then means that applying thrust will cause attitude changes typically undesired by the operator.

Let's say you are travelling 50m/s at a bearing of 090 degrees (right). If you then wish to travel at 50m/s at bearing 180 degrees (down), you *might* think the best way to do this would be to orient your ship to 180 degrees, and hold the main engine until you course correct to the desired heading. This is NOT the case. The most effective use of propellant would be to rotate to 225 degrees and burn the main engine until you are travelling 50m/s at 180 degrees.