Easy landings using an analog control for your vertical thruster axis
Here's a tip to ease landings. It's particularly relevant for Distant Worlds, because it hugely reduces the chance of taking damage on landings, even with minimal shields.
When you're landing with flight assist on, your thrusters will normally will try to keep your ship in a stable hover in the absence of other thruster control input. Most people fly with their vertical thrusters mapped to some sort of hat on their joystick, which means they're either all-on or all-off. The combination of these can be deadly on high G worlds: If you apply down thrust, it not only nudges your top thrusters, it kills your bottom thrusters, which is what leads to that "dropping like a stone" maneuver. This is why a lot of people recommend things like descending vertically (so you can control your descent with your main drive) and using flight assist off for your final drop (which effectively just kills your bottom thrusters). There's a better way, though.
If you have a spare analog control (dial, slider, etc), you can map it to the vertical thruster axis in your control settings. This lets you exercise fine control of your vertical thrusters, setting (and holding) ascent and descent speeds very accurately. This works in concert with the normal up/down mappings, so you can continue to use the hat for normal thruster operations. The neutral point for your thrusters will be halfway along the analog control, so this works best with a control that has a detent (like the knobs on an X52 throttle). Because analog controls can have some noise in them, you'll want to set a bit of a deadzone in the mapping for your vertical thruster axis.
On my X52, for instance, I have this mapped to the top :
And you map it in your settings here:
I don't have an Achenar permit, so I played around with this on Epsilon Hydri 1 (3.85G). With 7 landings in a shielded Cobra, I never lost a single ring of shields. I also did a series of 4 shieldless landings, so that I could gauge the impact of landing by looking at hull losses, and I was able to average about 1% hull loss per landing. So I still wouldn't recommend a shieldless fit for landing, but this seems to be well within the capacity for extremely light shields to handle.
The strategy I ended up settling on was:
The one potential gotcha with this is that you need to remember to zero out your analog control after landing, or you will take off with the same thruster settings. Again, this is where a control with a detent in the middle comes in handy. Taking off without the thrusters zeroed out isn't fatal, however, since you can override the analog control with your vertical thruster hat, or simply let the thruster setting re-land you.
Here's a video showing this technique:
[video=youtube;MNk2OW2zbo8]
]Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNk2OW2zbo8[/video]
Here's a tip to ease landings. It's particularly relevant for Distant Worlds, because it hugely reduces the chance of taking damage on landings, even with minimal shields.
When you're landing with flight assist on, your thrusters will normally will try to keep your ship in a stable hover in the absence of other thruster control input. Most people fly with their vertical thrusters mapped to some sort of hat on their joystick, which means they're either all-on or all-off. The combination of these can be deadly on high G worlds: If you apply down thrust, it not only nudges your top thrusters, it kills your bottom thrusters, which is what leads to that "dropping like a stone" maneuver. This is why a lot of people recommend things like descending vertically (so you can control your descent with your main drive) and using flight assist off for your final drop (which effectively just kills your bottom thrusters). There's a better way, though.
If you have a spare analog control (dial, slider, etc), you can map it to the vertical thruster axis in your control settings. This lets you exercise fine control of your vertical thrusters, setting (and holding) ascent and descent speeds very accurately. This works in concert with the normal up/down mappings, so you can continue to use the hat for normal thruster operations. The neutral point for your thrusters will be halfway along the analog control, so this works best with a control that has a detent (like the knobs on an X52 throttle). Because analog controls can have some noise in them, you'll want to set a bit of a deadzone in the mapping for your vertical thruster axis.
On my X52, for instance, I have this mapped to the top :
And you map it in your settings here:
I don't have an Achenar permit, so I played around with this on Epsilon Hydri 1 (3.85G). With 7 landings in a shielded Cobra, I never lost a single ring of shields. I also did a series of 4 shieldless landings, so that I could gauge the impact of landing by looking at hull losses, and I was able to average about 1% hull loss per landing. So I still wouldn't recommend a shieldless fit for landing, but this seems to be well within the capacity for extremely light shields to handle.
The strategy I ended up settling on was:
- Perform a normal approach from orbital cruise, aiming to come to a hover at 100m
- Use the analog control to set a descent rate of about 4 m/s, coming to a hover at 10m
- Use the analog control to set a descent rate of 1 m/s until touchdown.
The one potential gotcha with this is that you need to remember to zero out your analog control after landing, or you will take off with the same thruster settings. Again, this is where a control with a detent in the middle comes in handy. Taking off without the thrusters zeroed out isn't fatal, however, since you can override the analog control with your vertical thruster hat, or simply let the thruster setting re-land you.
Here's a video showing this technique:
[video=youtube;MNk2OW2zbo8]
Last edited:
