Does anybody know of a good source of learning "flight assist off" that is somewhat current? I ran across these well done utube videos today of which are only 3 of a supposed 5 video course and dont know if the commander didnt make them and stopped at #3.
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Newcomer / Intro FAOFF
- Thread starter timedriver
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I find using FA Off while conducting a landing, been really good FA Off exercise for me.
No pressure, ..except slightly if it's a monitored landing pad, then you might find yourself flipped over kicking your landing gear in the air with a loitering violation on the wrong pad! Or something!
Next time you see the landing pad number is backwards from what you thought, try using it to do a quick 180 and then re-enable FA and try to come in all natural like
Have fun cheers CMDR timedriver
No pressure, ..except slightly if it's a monitored landing pad, then you might find yourself flipped over kicking your landing gear in the air with a loitering violation on the wrong pad! Or something!
Next time you see the landing pad number is backwards from what you thought, try using it to do a quick 180 and then re-enable FA and try to come in all natural like
Have fun cheers CMDR timedriver
While it was 3307 when I wrote it, and it places a few other aspects of flight ahead of making use of toggling Flight Assist, I still use and enjoy very much the gear-boosting style I described in Hunter, specifically in Chapter 2: Aviation, posted here originally as Fast, fierce and effective bounty-hunting with a Mamba.
It does not require a Mamba specifically; most starships will benefit to some extent, where those with a high-duration and high-acceleration Boost will benefit more than those without. Very much following that chapter, truly the best advice I can give for flight in general is first to understand exactly what Boost does, then to try gear-boosting to move, turn, dodge and chase, then to introduce brief moments of disabling Flight Assist during the effect. That will give you expedited access to the most useful thing that disabling Flight Assist can do for you.
The next useful thing it can do for you is to take a snapshot of your trajectory, which involves not touching the controls, or at most very little if it could use a slight correction. This starport docking video contains a good example at around 20 seconds—followed immediately by a gear-boost, of course. I use that also to drift past targets and loop around; such occurs often in this grapple compilation, and when I tried out Rapid Fire.
For more involved use of disabling Flight Assist, I suggest looking not for a disabled-Flight-Assist tutorial, but for an anti-xeno tutorial. A great example is destroying a Cyclops swarm, which can be done as an exercise by constructing any relatively tough vessel for survival and just fitting a remote-release Flak launcher; Flight Assist off, drifting backwards and aiming shells between the swarm and the reticule will get your rotation under good control. Proceeding to a full anti-xeno vessel and a classic Cyclops kill with orbiting to avoid its main weapon will represent an example of having Flight Assist disabled for much more time than it was enabled.
Beyond that, you could try keeping Flight Assist off all of the time, but at that point you are choosing to tolerate the things it cannot do for you rather than taking advantage of the things it can.
It does not require a Mamba specifically; most starships will benefit to some extent, where those with a high-duration and high-acceleration Boost will benefit more than those without. Very much following that chapter, truly the best advice I can give for flight in general is first to understand exactly what Boost does, then to try gear-boosting to move, turn, dodge and chase, then to introduce brief moments of disabling Flight Assist during the effect. That will give you expedited access to the most useful thing that disabling Flight Assist can do for you.
The next useful thing it can do for you is to take a snapshot of your trajectory, which involves not touching the controls, or at most very little if it could use a slight correction. This starport docking video contains a good example at around 20 seconds—followed immediately by a gear-boost, of course. I use that also to drift past targets and loop around; such occurs often in this grapple compilation, and when I tried out Rapid Fire.
For more involved use of disabling Flight Assist, I suggest looking not for a disabled-Flight-Assist tutorial, but for an anti-xeno tutorial. A great example is destroying a Cyclops swarm, which can be done as an exercise by constructing any relatively tough vessel for survival and just fitting a remote-release Flak launcher; Flight Assist off, drifting backwards and aiming shells between the swarm and the reticule will get your rotation under good control. Proceeding to a full anti-xeno vessel and a classic Cyclops kill with orbiting to avoid its main weapon will represent an example of having Flight Assist disabled for much more time than it was enabled.
Beyond that, you could try keeping Flight Assist off all of the time, but at that point you are choosing to tolerate the things it cannot do for you rather than taking advantage of the things it can.
Thanx aside from that....does "standard" vs "alternative flight" play any kind of role in faoff
I am not fully sure what you mean with standard and alternative, although the most important thing here is not to view Flight Assist as being either always-on or always-off! You can disable it when you want to drift or rotate more effectively, and you can enable it when you want superior slowing or stopping. Keeping Flight Assist always-on or always-off is much like leaving the Distributor points alone rather than managing them to your advantage.
If alternative flight means making use of gear-boosting, it does help a lot while Flight Assist is disabled if you also want to use boosts at all. Without the landing gear, boosting while Flight Assist is disabled will leave you drifting away for quite a while with relatively poor ability to stop moving—other than using another boost, of course. With the landing gear deployed during the boost effect then retracted afterwards, your speed should end up in the blue zone, which is perfect for good agility while Flight Assist is disabled. Look for some hooning videos for great examples of this! Here is a good one; the pilot is using the Cargo scoop rather than Landing gear, but the effect is the same.
Without boosting at all, flying around without Flight Assist becomes relatively slow and graceful; one uses modest speeds and modest corrections to keep things controlled. This has limited use, perhaps a bit for mining or docking, although it can be quite relaxing.
I believe that's control layouts, standard vs alternate flight controls, for if you want two control schemes. Right? For example, the default controller scheme uses the right joystick for yaw standard or horizontal thrust alternative.
You might conceivably have a standard scheme for assist, alternate scheme for FA Off, among all kinds of possibilities. But per se it is not to do with Flight Assist in any way
I only mentioned it because evidently "alternative flight" seems to be more helpful when manually docking and wasnt sure if it might be also be helpful in controlling your ship in faoff regarding over correcting and such.
Thanx much for both of your responses and have a lot to think about.
Well, when you put it that way, it sure might sorta - if that's how you access your horizontal thrusters. (Do you, like I, play with a xbox style controller)?
So with that default controller scheme, someone might get their ship attitude lined up paralel to the the pad in standard control (yaw), but, need to scooch a bit left or right, into the middle of the pad. They go to alternate control and use the horizontal thruster. It may be a common misconception to think of the alternate flight control just for that purpose of landing.
Still regardless of FA, yes you should look for discussion of alternate flight control or ask about it in its own context. You only need to necessarily understand it if (I think controller only) it is required overload the horizontal behavior on the right thumb stick (default controller scheme).
Anyway, it is quite a pleasure soaring sideways through the air with FA Off and hitting the horizontal thruster to slow down.
Coming in for the landing from the side, spin sideways and slow down that way and descend, (and usually turn FA back on about this point).
I'm no pro, couldn't write ya a chapter book about it, don't read em much either but might have to try this nice imperial themed one from CMDR Zuno!
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Moxen Wolf's videos are accurate and will give you a good overview of things you can do to practice FA-off. The flight model hasn't changed much since they were released, so they're still good references.
Where I would depart from his advice is that I would learn in as large a ship as I could afford. The small ships are twitchy, which makes it much easier to lose your bearings. I used a Python to learn because it's manoeuvrable enough to make you have to learn to control rotation, while still taking enough time to rotate to help you learn to counter it.
If I recall correctly, you are using a contoller. In my view, this makes FA-off significantly more challenging - you don't have enough axes on the sticks for full control of the 6 degrees of freedom.
Where I would depart from his advice is that I would learn in as large a ship as I could afford. The small ships are twitchy, which makes it much easier to lose your bearings. I used a Python to learn because it's manoeuvrable enough to make you have to learn to control rotation, while still taking enough time to rotate to help you learn to counter it.
If I recall correctly, you are using a contoller. In my view, this makes FA-off significantly more challenging - you don't have enough axes on the sticks for full control of the 6 degrees of freedom.
Good point about the bigger ships....as far as my controller is concerned would altering the dead zones in the ship control options might be beneficial?
When I learned FA off smaller ships were ‘better’ exactly because they were twitchy. Makes you basically jump in at the deep end. I know of people learning FA off on big ships then had to ‘re-learn’ on smaller ships.
I fly FA off 100% and once you learn it and can fly it, you simply don’t need FA On. It’s like riding a bicycle or driving a car. You don’t need to think about the movements, you just think about where you want to go.
If anything FA on becomes a hindrance. Obviously everyone has their own play style though and appreciate it’s not for everyone.
Moxen Wolf videos are still relevant, an amazing resource.
I fly FA off 100% and once you learn it and can fly it, you simply don’t need FA On. It’s like riding a bicycle or driving a car. You don’t need to think about the movements, you just think about where you want to go.
If anything FA on becomes a hindrance. Obviously everyone has their own play style though and appreciate it’s not for everyone.
Moxen Wolf videos are still relevant, an amazing resource.
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Mostly so that @timedriver gets correct information, enabling Flight Assist is objectively superior for stopping movement¹! In that context, keeping Flight Assist disabled becomes the hindrance. As with most starship things which can be switched, to leave it fixed either way is to forfeit part of what the vessel is capable!
1. Also by extension, for significant trajectory changes as a goal to which deceleration contributes.
I also prefer just leaving FA off all the time (flipping it on just to scoop materials if I'm out of limpets, which is rare), and most of my ships are small. Having never flown a ship larger than a fully-laden Keelback, can't really comment on which is better to learn on, but I really had no problems learning with small.
Agree that docking is a great (and fun) exercise, and tethering as well, per Moxen Wolf's videos.
Agree that docking is a great (and fun) exercise, and tethering as well, per Moxen Wolf's videos.
Dead zones no; response curves yes.
that’s not ‘objectively’ true actually. There has been research on this. Science! in the interests of correct information:
forums.frontier.co.uk
And, subjectively, I can fly better and more efficiently fa off than fa on.
FA-on IS slowing you down!
One of our group a few years ago did a load of work figuring out ship base agility stats for thrusters and boosts etc. I have decided to do some further work on this and built up max speed setups for each ship and directly measure their accelerations and decelerations etc. And I was doing all of...
And, subjectively, I can fly better and more efficiently fa off than fa on.
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that’s not ‘objectively’ true actually. There has been research on this. Science! in the interests of correct information:
FA-on IS slowing you down!
One of our group a few years ago did a load of work figuring out ship base agility stats for thrusters and boosts etc. I have decided to do some further work on this and built up max speed setups for each ship and directly measure their accelerations and decelerations etc. And I was doing all of...
Will that explain to me why a straight-line retro deceleration from full forward speed in my Mamba takes seven seconds with Flight Assist enabled, but twenty seconds with Flight Assist disabled?
Are you using one set of thrusters though?
Stopping quickly FAoff is about using different thrusters and that is quicker than a straight forward FAon retro thrust.
Of course you need to be able to control your ship FAoff.
Elite Dangerous FAOFF Training
Welcome to my Flight Assist Off Training Series. I'm very excited to continue producing this series with the help of my fellow Newton's Gambit Commanders and...
www.youtube.com
This is the playlist, it stops at #5. As he said, the vids build upon each so optimally you want to take them in a series. However, I personally find that it's beneficial when you hit a wall, to just move on and come back to that wall later. Let the hands and brain simmer and suddenly, it clicks. Lesson #1, tethering, is crucial as it forms the foundation of intent. Where you want to go, how you stop there once you got there, and how to move to the next thing. The tethering trains your hands to "do stuff" and by changing attitude and moving location, you're basically "flying" fa off, albeit slowly at first but once you can do it slow, you can do it fast. It's deceptively useful.
When you first started, a lot of the time you'd be "correcting the ship" rather than "flying the ship". As your hands get more practice, you'll notice every input becomes intentional and slowly, you will start to fly the ship. This is analogous to flying RC planes (not a drone unless you're into FPV racing
) as drones nowadays self corrects. But if you have any experience in flying RCs, you'll notice the same progress in your sims and ultimately your first crash IRL As to the ship size. Start exactly as described in the vid, a stock sidewinder. You're free to A rate it, engineer it whatever. But to follow the lessons it's best to use a stock one at first. It is supposed to be twitchy. The twitchiness is important as it shows your mistakes visually to your brain so your hands can learn. In a big ship, your mistakes are muted and you will learn slower, or not at all.
If you're interested to do stuff fa off and would like company, feel free to join our discord in my sig. Have fun in your lunar module
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Of course I am—as I said, straight-line retro. If I have to forfeit orientation and rotate to use the laterals just to get the same deceleration while Flight Assist is disabled, that very much proves my point: to leave it fixed either way is to forfeit part of what the vessel is capable.
As a secondary note, rotating for laterals with Flight Assist enabled also improves the deceleration further. I know the always-disabled pilots love their always-disabled, but simply it can not surpass enabled for deceleration.