Destination Navigation locks and Scan/Target locks

[PopePhil]

Unless I'm missing something - and it IS easy to miss stuff in this game - I find the 'single' lock rather frustrating.

The scenario I'm talking about it where you've got a lock on a station, somewhere in the distance in the current system - or to the next star on your route - and you see a ship, or unidentified signal source that you like to scan. So, you lock onto that whilst you do the scan... and then have to re-lock onto your destination.

My request would be to have separate locks - to be able to retain your destination lock whilst scanning.

or is that already available?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There are separate navigation and target locks, but the problem is that a lot of the target selection buttons do both when you're in supercruise.

So if you do 'target forward', your navigation target gets set to whatever planet is in front of you, and your contact target to the ship you actually wanted.

If you do 'target next' that only changes your contact target and keeps your navigation target fixed to the right thing ... but it can be a lot of cycling through to get the thing you actually wanted, as well as making it less straightforward to select 'nothing' and therefore see your navigation approach details in the centre-left panel.


Additionally, signal sources are navigation rather than contact targets, so you definitely lose your original navigation target if you lock one of those.


Two changes which might help a lot with this:
- if you route to a station, keep remembering that route until you actually get there (or set a new route), so that you can use "next on route" to switch your navigation target back to the correct value afterwards
- option to have separate "navigation target forwards" and "contact target forwards" keybinds.