Getting the most out of Wings

[Spam]

Just tried Wings finally, for the first time with me mate.
We used Teamspeak instaed of in game comms.

Overall it was a good experience, but I'm sure we are missing things. Keeping together was a lot more manual than I thought it was going to be. Unless were missing something.

So for the different stages of travelling what do you lot do?

1/ Transition from Normal Space to SC (say going from station to Nav Beacon)
2/ Transition from Normal space to Hyper Space.
3/ Travelling in SC
4/ Dropping for SC into station

It was all a bit odd for the following ship. I thought there would be a whole load more syncronisation.

i.e
Entering Hyper Space the following ship entered 5 - 6 seconds after the first jumped. Same with SC
Travelling in SC was very manual, with speeds having to be matched manually
Target desination info for trailing ship is not good at all, there was loads of overshooting as time/distance info limited
Dropping out from SC was very random. Sometimes we would both be within 10km of target, more often than not the trailing ship would be pulled out at the 20km mark.
Trying to judge speed/braking for Wing Beacons is a tricky little beast.


Have we just missed something? Or a lot of things?

So this is a call to those with some Wing experience behind them, any tips/hints practices that you use to keep Wing cohesion tight?

Thanks :-]

 

[Hell Razor5543]

A useful trick I was shown is that the first vessel heads off from the star towards the destination, while the wingmate waits at the star. Once the leader has reached their destination (or has been interdicted) the wingmate heads off that way at full throttle. Once they are in range of the dropout point they automatically drop into the leaders' location. I have had this happen at over 50LS distance and speeds over 1C. This does need Wingman Nav Lock to be engaged for it to work.

 

[drkaii]

The wing beacon works at huge distances. The person to drop first has to remember to enable it each time. It doesn't stay on. The wing navlock does. Which is also annoying - you have to remember to turn it off if you're mate has his beacon on and you're leaving first.

All in all though, once you get used to those 2 things, the beacon is amazing. Really saves time for going from supercruise to normal flight. I was trading with someone today, and I was much faster than him. But we didn't lose anytime because even though I'd be docked already by the time he arrived at the system, the beacon caught everything up each time. He'd almost immediately drop when he got in.

The other variants though: normal flight > supercruise or hyperspace or supercruise to hyperspace are quite inefficient and require coordination. They only work at a very limited range. Leaving normal flight is a pain, the distance is quite tiny. It's normally faster to just both hit your FSD at the same time and leave at the same time, and make up the trajectories later. If you're planning on dropping again, you don't even need to be together, the beacon as mentioned above will suck you in from great distances. I haven't figured out what causes you to sometimes be close and sometimes be far. It's never a huge problem though.

When jumping from system to system, the best idea is for the person leaving first to throttle to zero close to each star and then full throttle only when the FSD has fully charged. That way he will be right by the star, so the other wing members, coming in at whatever rate they are, will not have to then accelerate away from the star to catch up to the wake. You'll build up a lag otherwise and the guy in front will have to keep on waiting and this is pretty tedious.

When you are just too far away, it's much quicker to just wait until they arrive, target them (which targets their system) and jump.

I also feel I might not be getting it properly, as, apart from that beacon, the rest of it seems very time wasting or even pointless in 75% of cases...

This kinda sums everything up:

http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Wings