So when a player exits supercruise in the designated "safe zone" at the appropriate speeds the game creates a shiney new instance/island/zone and places your ship within the structure of the local space station and you instantly die.
You think this isn't a bug ?
Really ?
Honest ?
Doh !
It's not a bug.
It's a matter of knowing what you're doing.
If you'd bothered to read exactly what is happening and how you can minimise the risk to yourself then you'd know that too.
But for the clearly hard of thinking and the terminally lazy I'll take you all through it once again.
Are we sitting comfortably?
Good, then I'll begin.
First a couple of things you should already know.
The ships require you to fly them.
There is risk in flying the ships.
The universe is unforgiving of mistakes.
Supercruise dropout zones are clearly highlighted on the HUD. The distance scale you will notice does not go to zero.
So if you drop out of SC closer to the station than the inner end of the blue zone you're taking a risk.
That was killing a lot of people in previous builds because they were dropping out at essentially zero distance so they could avoid the 20km flight to the station. This is still happening to some (foolish) people but it's not what many people including me have experienced.
This new problem is a consequence of some stations being longer than the normal SC dropout distance. Now the station is only long in one dimension so you will only experience this particular brown trousers moment if you happen to come out of SC approaching from the tail end of the station. The ship's distance from the station is calculated from what appears to be a point inside the cylindrical volume of the docking chamber. On some stations that is a very long way away from the tail end of the station. So if you come out at the tail end your safe distance is taken up with station superstructure.
Hence the changes of underwear and frequent insurance claims.
The current dropout distance off about 7km IIRC was arrived at to appease the folks who insisted on taking the risk of a very close dropout. They didn't want to drop out at 20km because they're easily bored apparently.
So a closer dropout distance was implemented.
No bugs thus far.
So how do you avoid unnecessary underwear cleaning bills?
One has to understand the station configuration in space.
The stations are rotationally stabilised like a gyroscope. They rotate in the same direction. Because of this rotational stabilisation their entrances always point in the same direction.
So there is a point in the stations orbit around its parent body when it's entrance is pointing at the body. Therefore on the opposite side of the stations orbit the entrance will be facing away from the body.
There is a complication for some stations, particularly some Coriollis, as their rotational axis is also slightly inclined to the plane of their orbit. This means that the entrance never points exactly at or away from the parent body. It's never much of an inclination but it's there nonetheless.
Of course for a Coriollis none of this matters because they can be approximated to a sphere.
But for the Ocellus and Orbis stations it is absolutely critical knowledge to avoid exactly the story of thing many people think is a bug.
If you happen to know in advance where the station is around its orbit and in which direction it is pointing at that time then you can come in either inside or outside the orbit aligned with the orbital plane.
No-one, as far as I'm aware, is tracking this sort of thing and so we end up with people dropping out along the orbital plane and having a roughly fifty fifty chance of getting the stations entrance somewhere in front of them or off being caught up I the superstructure. It's not fifty fifty, it's much less, probably something like a twenty percent chance of having the entrance pretty much in front of you, or of having a brown trousers moment.
Still no bugs.
So what should one do to minimise the chance of an incident?
The simple answer is to approach the station from above or below its orbital plane.
Come at the station from above or below.
Zero percent chance of being caught up in the stations superstructure.
Zero percent chance.
It's very simple and straightforward when you understand the situation.
Do you understand it now?
If not, say what part you don't get and I'll attempt to explain further.
