Newcomer / Intro Help me solve this FA Off riddle

purf · Mar 12, 2015

This has been confusing me for some time but so far I had attributed it to "in the heat of the battle", pressing wrong buttons.
Until now, after an hour at a RES (Elite has become a different game, somehow. I'm getting rich here?

) made me investigate:

My ship moves forward. I engage the reverse Thrusters to the point where I am moving backwards - let go of them again and
the ship picks up its assigned forward speed. If I hold FA Off while doing this, the ship's throttle/speed gets overwritten and
it stays in reverse. I can imagine this might feel or become natural when one is using a HOTAS setup but as my Throttle and
Thrusters are on the keyboard, I struggle to make sense of it. I would expect the thrusters to have an only intermediate effect
no matter what?

huwthomas · Mar 12, 2015

purf said:
My ship moves forward. I engage the reverse Thrusters to the point where I am moving backwards - let go of them again and
the ship picks up its assigned forward speed.

... because the Flight Assist system looks at your throttle setting and fires the thrusters as needed to match the assigned speed.

If I hold FA Off while doing this

... the previous procedure obviously makes no sense. During FAOFF, an analogue throttle works as a thruster control axis instead; presumably the keyboard throttle inputs are similarly changed?

the100thmonkey · Mar 13, 2015

With flight assist on, the throttle sets a speed and the thrusters work to tale you to it.

With flight assist off, the throttle inputs directly dictate the amount of thrust. It seems like the reverse thrust input overrides the throttle state until you change it. I have reverse thrust maped to a toggle switch, which doesn't seem to cause the problem you describe.

Hence, in FAON, zeroing the throttle results in zero relative motion. With FAOFF, zeroing the throttle from 120m/s, for example, results in a constant speed for 120m/s.

An object at rest will stay at rest until a force acts upon it. An object in motion will maintain that motion unless acted on by an external force.

Sapient6 · Mar 13, 2015

huwthomas said:
... the previous procedure obviously makes no sense. During FAOFF, an analogue throttle works as a thruster control axis instead; presumably the keyboard throttle inputs are similarly changed?

Keyboard throttle behaves much different than an analog throttle when you toggle FA off and on.

When you toggle FA OFF the throttle zeroes out. You can hold down the throttle direction (forward or reverse) but the moment you release it your throttle immediately zeroes out.

When you toggle FA back on your throttle is automatically set to match your current velocity and direction of travel.

It's kind of a pain really, and it's definitely an aspect of the game controls where having a HOTAS is a clear advantage. I can't offer a solution to the weirdness of keyboard throttle control while FA is off, but having shortcuts for some specific throttle settings you use frequently can help when you turn FA back on.

Rutg3rO · Mar 13, 2015

I think the two keys here are the explanation of Sapient about the keyboard and FA OFF and the fact in FA ON that you use the reverse thrusters instead of your throttle equivalent of your keyboard. When you press your throttle forward key, you set your ship to go with x speed forward. Would you press the throttle backward key enough, you would stop and after that you will fly backwards.
But now, you have set your throttle to forward and use the reverse thrusters to go backwards. A nice trick in combat where you can set your desired speed, but can play with it by using the override thrusters. But in the end, when you don't use those override thrusters anymore, your ship returns to the speed and direction, you wanted it to go. If you want to keep going backwards, you should have put your throttle in reverse.

Sapient6 · Mar 13, 2015

When using a keyboard throttle with FA OFF, it isn't going to matter one bit whether you use reverse thrusters or reverse throttle.

Rutg3rO · Mar 13, 2015

Sapient6 said:
When using a keyboard throttle with FA OFF, it isn't going to matter one bit whether you use reverse thrusters or reverse throttle.

no, I was indeed talking about FA ON. I interpretted the OP's post a bit wrong. I thought both the FA-on and FA-off confused him

purf · Mar 14, 2015

I'll preface my answer with "

"

It feels a bit wierd changing controls after three months but Thanks to you, I dumped the forward/reverse thrusters
and am now using 6 keys on the keyboard hand instead of 8. +Gracefulness. I just wish I could set up the continuous
Throttle to be more responsive. And thus, I have even found a use for Landing Overwrites.