Fuel Scooping: Tell us about your method
- Thread starter Soupbot
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I love going down on the right one.
Visibility through the canopy is most obstructed by the nose of the ship, so I prefer to align with & approach stations, and to scoop fuel with those objects on the topside of the canopy. I have scooped sideways plenty of times but pitch is also quite a lot faster to effect than yaw so there's an almost natural preference there as well.
Top
looking at the star, upside down from the top
I'm a side scooper, then roll out of it onto the heading for my next jump. Not out of any attempt at super efficiency or anything, it's just what feels natural to me.
Side-scooper, for two reasons.
1) Orbiting a star to align for my next jump kind of reminds me of the whole "Death Star moving around Yavin 4" thing.
2) More practically, a monitor has more horizonal screen real-estate than vertical, so it's often useful to orient yourself to take advantage of that.
If I'm honest, it's mostly the "Death Star" thing, though.
1) Orbiting a star to align for my next jump kind of reminds me of the whole "Death Star moving around Yavin 4" thing.
2) More practically, a monitor has more horizonal screen real-estate than vertical, so it's often useful to orient yourself to take advantage of that.
If I'm honest, it's mostly the "Death Star" thing, though.
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Just to expand on that a bit, I do the same thing when I'm landing at a surface outpost.
You can't see through the nose of your ship so you can't always see your destination but if you roll through 90° you can usually see it somewhere at the side of the screen.
I wondered if I might start to do things differently when I started playing in VR but the same thing still applies because (Lakon ships aside) you can always look out of the side of a cockpit but not through the floor.
Fun fact: in real-life, that's why most helicopters have little windows somewhere near the pilot's feet; so the pilot has something to help them see exactly where they're landing.
Full speed and always roll with the star at the "top" of the ship
I'm top up, it's easy to see how close I am to the exclusion zone, easy to accelerate around the star while managing both my angle and my speed 
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Charge in madly at full throttle to just above the exclusion line, a few seconds to fill and I'm off. Unless you have it turned off anyone can see the exclusion zone line out the front canopy. When I first started playing through excess of caution I never went deeply in and turned sideways, then I found out I could fit a bigger fuel scoop...duh! These days by the time I would have gotten in and turned sideways I am already full and heading away. If you work it right in pulling away you will stop scooping just as it finished filling up, waste time? Never!
This. hums imperial march