Newcomer / Intro Cargo lost / jettison question-suggestion

[Silphylis]

Hi Everyone,

I am fairly new and cannot explain something that happen to me today.
I was just getting out of hyperspace near a station and pressing the "tab" button (my turbo) to get closer when a lot of container started to appear behind me.
I was wondering why they were so many and stop before docking.
Upon checking my haul I realised that, of course it was my 104 gold container floating in space.
Plenty of other ship were around me at the time.

Now, I play with the keyboard and mouse and the jettison button is pretty far away from my hand ("end" button) so I really wonder what happen.
Did I press the jettison ? I doubt it but possible ? if so is there a message or a warning ?
I heard that sometime the cargo hatch could malfunction when overheating can anyone confirm or deny ?
I know there is a device to hack cargo hatch would you get a warning if someone use it against you ? if not could that be implemented

Thank you for any reply :
A puzzled commander

 

[rciq]

1. Myself I did drop all my cargo by accident a few times. Eventually rebinding the jettison shortcut to ctrl+end became a part of my routine when setting up a new machine for playing ED
2. Subsystems will break because of heat but it takes really long for them to even lose 10% health. I think the cargo hatch needs to go below 50% before it starts malfunctioning (someone please confirm). In any case I doubt heat could break your cargo hatch without you noticing serious damage to everything else.
3. The device you're referring to at the end of your post is a hatch breaker. It requires the target's shield to be down, and also wouldn't cause all your cargo to spill at once. Also afaik using a hatch breaker counts as offence, so you would see some hostile pilot around.

tldr; Unless you were afk for a long time, it probably was an accidental keystroke. See #1 for how to prevent it from happening again.

EDIT: There is no confirmation when you use the jettison shortcut. After pressing it you only experience a sound effect and then the mess on the radar...

 

[Silphylis]

1. rebinding the jettison shortcut to ctrl+end became a part of my routine
2. Subsystems ... takes really long (to break).
I think the cargo hatch needs to go below 50% before it starts malfunctioning (someone please confirm).
3. hatch breaker. It requires the target's shield to be down
tldr; Unless you were afk for a long time, it probably was an accidental keystroke. See #1 for how to prevent it from happening again.
EDIT: There is no confirmation when you use the jettison shortcut. After pressing it you only experience a sound effect and then the mess on the radar...

Thank a lot for all those informations.

 

[Glenn Ross]

Is it possible that you are in a ship with more power requirement than capacity? I.e. , did your boost rob you of the power needed to keep the hatch closed? Check your power settings - if cargo hatch is the lowest priority, especially if you had been fiddling with your priorities just before this happened, then this may well be the case.
.
I had a problem once when I upgraded a ship, forgot all about the power requirements when installing a new shield. Left the dock, and my shields robbed me of all power, leaving me with no way to get off the pad - until I put shields to a lower priority to get my engines back online.
.
Spent a few seconds pinballing around the back of the dock, then got control and got out of dodge. Immediately got permission to dock again, repaired and returned to previous shield configuration and left the second time without incident. Taught me to check my power requirements every time I change anything, and not to panic if something goes wrong.

 

[Firestarter]

I cannot conceive of any eventuality when I would want to jettison all my cargo. I did it accidentally once, I think by default it's the END key. That was in pre beta and as I recall the game couldn't cope with the hundreds of objects and it crashed.

So I moved the mapping of END to something else. Now I have no key mapping for, 'waste the next fifteen minutes picking up my own cargo and cursing FD when the canisters degrade and disappear.'

Also, my cargo door module is powered off to save power. So I can't even deliberately jettison cargo.