Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

That's not a bug, not sure what problem you are talking about here but if you approach your target to fast at multiple times the speed of light, well you are going to overshoot, you need to learn to control your speed when approaching and that's not that hard to do.
I usually do but sometimes I'm not paying full attention. It feels like 95% of the time I see a 'slow down' warning I miss the target even though I've throttled right back.
 
Yeah. I don't like the idea of gimbled weapons on small ships because it's feel like an admission of defeat when it comes to aiming skills. I did take a serious look at it recently though because the Cobra's small hardpoints are so widely positioned.

Then I saw complaints about NPC's spamming chaff and I just thought 'nah'. Not worth the bother.
I see fixed weapons as an admission that the technology isn’t good enough.

Chaff spamming is a bit of a problem as it does increase the time to kill however you usually get breaks between chaff launches when you can hit them hard and the closer you get the less effective chaff is. You can use the periods while they are chaffing to let the weapons capacitor to recover.

Chaff causes your systems to swing the aim randomly a few degrees off line so you will get a few hits as the swing crosses the ship the closer you are the bigger the angular size of the ship so the harder it is for the chaff to cause a miss, get in close enough to a larger ship and you will barely miss a shot.
 
I usually do but sometimes I'm not paying full attention. It feels like 95% of the time I see a 'slow down' warning I miss the target even though I've throttled right back.
Don’t throttle right back, for space targets throttle to 75% (middle of the blue band or better it can be a bound preset) at around 13 seconds to target but definitely before 6 seconds, for a planetary target throttle to 50% ( near the bottom of the blue band or again it can be bound) take your hands off the throttle and it will automagically adjust your speed to hold 6 or 10 seconds to target approach speeds until the drop. For planetary approaches I find it is better to setup early and put some manoeuvres in otherwise the speed doesn’t come down fast enough to enter glide, if your approach is indirect you might not need to do that.

If you see the warning that your ship is being slowed down by the stations gravity or you see the time to target has dropped below 6 seconds you are almost always too close and too fast though killing the throttle and violent manoeuvring can sometimes save the day.
 
I usually do but sometimes I'm not paying full attention. It feels like 95% of the time I see a 'slow down' warning I miss the target even though I've throttled right back.

Because, and I repeat this again despite having posted it many, many time before, that is not a warning that it is time to slow down!!!!!! Yes 6 exclamations marks because this has been explained many times, that is a warning that you are entering a gravity well and the ship speed is being inhibited by the increased gravity. It has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with ship navigation except in the broader sense that you are passing through a gravity well, which is why they are changing it in this patch to say "gravity well," nothing to do with navigating to your target and getting there at the correct speed. It is not a bug, the problem is you don't understand what it means.

You can throttle to zero and you will shoot past because this isn't a warning about going to fast on approach to the station/FC/Planet/moon, it is irrelevant to navigation and approach speed, you need to be managing that yourself using tried and true methods most of us have been using for years!
 
Though I hate the way it takes so long to slow down and there's no way to recover until you've passed your destination. I'd like to assume that's a bug but the problem's existed since I started playing the game.
This mechanic is taken from the real world. It is called a "swing by manoeuvre", passing a gravity well (sun, planet, anything that is considerably heavier than the spacecraft) to alter the course slightly and pick up a lot of speed. This is how the voyager probes got their speed to get where they are now.
 
This mechanic is taken from the real world. It is called a "swing by manoeuvre", passing a gravity well (sun, planet, anything that is considerably heavier than the spacecraft) to alter the course slightly and pick up a lot of speed. This is how the voyager probes got their speed to get where they are now.
Plausible - but not true.
Remember - when travelling between planets in ED, you're not in Einstein space, you're in some sort of bubble, probably mostly resembling an Alcubierre drive, with some other SciFi FTL features thrown in. What seems to happen is that your FTL drive in ED loses traction once the local gradient of gravity becomes too steep compared to your current speed - you don't speed up when diving into a gravity well, you just stop slowing down (or slow down slower): your tires are slipping, so to say.
In Einstein space, yes, you speed up when flying towards a gravity well, and you slow down correspondingly when flying out again - while in ED's hyperspace it's exactly the other way round: you speed up when coming out of a gravity well, and you slow down when going into one. The deeper you are in, the slower you go (try low waking from a 2g planet during a buckyball race when your target system is obscured 🤬 ).
In an Einsteinian swing-by maneuver, you can gain or lose speed, depending on your direction of travel compared to the planet's direction of travel (basically, the planet drags you along while you're close to it) and whether and how you fire your engines - but the speeds we're talking about here are decidedly non-relativistic.
 
I see fixed weapons as an admission that the technology isn’t good enough.

Chaff spamming is a bit of a problem as it does increase the time to kill however you usually get breaks between chaff launches when you can hit them hard and the closer you get the less effective chaff is. You can use the periods while they are chaffing to let the weapons capacitor to recover.

Chaff causes your systems to swing the aim randomly a few degrees off line so you will get a few hits as the swing crosses the ship the closer you are the bigger the angular size of the ship so the harder it is for the chaff to cause a miss, get in close enough to a larger ship and you will barely miss a shot.
Interesting. (y) I have McQuinn unlocked but I've no intention of engineering weapons until I explore combat a little more and figure out what upgrades benefits my style most, as opposed to just going for the thing which most looks OP. I'll make a note of this.
 
Don’t throttle right back, for space targets throttle to 75% (middle of the blue band or better it can be a bound preset) at around 13 seconds to target but definitely before 6 seconds, for a planetary target throttle to 50% ( near the bottom of the blue band or again it can be bound) take your hands off the throttle and it will automagically adjust your speed to hold 6 or 10 seconds to target approach speeds until the drop. For planetary approaches I find it is better to setup early and put some manoeuvres in otherwise the speed doesn’t come down fast enough to enter glide, if your approach is indirect you might not need to do that.

If you see the warning that your ship is being slowed down by the stations gravity or you see the time to target has dropped below 6 seconds you are almost always too close and too fast though killing the throttle and violent manoeuvring can sometimes save the day.
That's weird. I know the blue band is best for manoeuvring but I didn't really think of it as a way to actually slow down.

I'm pretty good at planet landings generally. Mostly because I am actually within the blue band 98% of the time.
 
That's weird. I know the blue band is best for manoeuvring but I didn't really think of it as a way to actually slow down.

I'm pretty good at planet landings generally. Mostly because I am actually within the blue band 98% of the time.

It's not as good as it used to be, yeah the key is being in the blue, then understanding what approach speeds are best for what size and gravity body you are approaching, get the angle of approach and speed right and you can just charge right in without touching a single control, get it wrong of course and you may have a long flight down. It's all down to experience.
 
Because, and I repeat this again despite having posted it many, many time before, that is not a warning that it is time to slow down!!!!!! Yes 6 exclamations marks because this has been explained many times, that is a warning that you are entering a gravity well and the ship speed is being inhibited by the increased gravity. It has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with ship navigation except in the broader sense that you are passing through a gravity well, which is why they are changing it in this patch to say "gravity well," nothing to do with navigating to your target and getting there at the correct speed. It is not a bug, the problem is you don't understand what it means.

You can throttle to zero and you will shoot past because this isn't a warning about going to fast on approach to the station/FC/Planet/moon, it is irrelevant to navigation and approach speed, you need to be managing that yourself using tried and true methods most of us have been using for years!
Well you didn't explain it to me, and they only just called it a gravity well today otherwise I would've completely understood what they meant. Everything beyond that third exclamation point is egregious.

Just kidding. I still have no idea what you nerds are talking about. Are you saying the gravity well traps me in some kind of time warp which stops me gaining control of the ship's speed until I'm essentially past the target?
 
Plausible - but not true.
Remember - when travelling between planets in ED, you're not in Einstein space, you're in some sort of bubble, probably mostly resembling an Alcubierre drive, with some other SciFi FTL features thrown in. What seems to happen is that your FTL drive in ED loses traction once the local gradient of gravity becomes too steep compared to your current speed - you don't speed up when diving into a gravity well, you just stop slowing down (or slow down slower): your tires are slipping, so to say.
In Einstein space, yes, you speed up when flying towards a gravity well, and you slow down correspondingly when flying out again - while in ED's hyperspace it's exactly the other way round: you speed up when coming out of a gravity well, and you slow down when going into one. The deeper you are in, the slower you go (try low waking from a 2g planet during a buckyball race when your target system is obscured 🤬 ).
In an Einsteinian swing-by maneuver, you can gain or lose speed, depending on your direction of travel compared to the planet's direction of travel (basically, the planet drags you along while you're close to it) and whether and how you fire your engines - but the speeds we're talking about here are decidedly non-relativistic.
I kind've understood it the way ED does. Slingshot manoeuvres and all that.
 
Are you saying the gravity well traps me in some kind of time warp which stops me gaining control of the ship's speed until I'm essentially past the target?
Sort of - your ship's hyperspace drive (frame shift drive) tries to adjust your ship's speed so that your speed remains controllable. The higher the gradient (the steeper the wall) is at your location, the lower the controllable speed. Easy to do when climbing out of the well, as you start slow and can only speed up so fast. Enter a well at too high a speed, though (above the blue band, essentially), and your FSD can't provide sufficient "traction" to slow you down any more.

If you ever find yourself on a trip to a station far off the jump-in point, that's easy to demonstrate. It'll take you ages to accelerate to your top speed (more or less halfway between star and destination). But if you make a stop there and drop back into real space, then go into FSD again, you'll be back at your top speed almost instantly. The practical (well, for a given value of "practical", as we're talking about a game) application is if you want to reach your destination inside a system fast. Yes, just point and go is a possibility - but you'll be faster overall by first getting away from the star flying steep out of the ecliptic plane (where all the planets and other assorted junk hangs around) and then curve back towards your target again. In the late phase of the approach, other tricks come into play. Remember that above someone suggested throttling back at 13...6 seconds ETA on your HUD? That's the safe option. There are a few people in the racer community who can consistently manage a station approach at three seconds ETA or less...
 
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