I hate the way supercruise handles.

[WR3ND]

Unless the devs made a recent change, thruster class does not affect SC manoeuvrability.

It's possible I could have gotten lucky/unlucky with the size of the stars I was scooping from when using and outfitting my Python for the Repair Jaques Station CG. It seemed like a fairly noticeable difference though. Does ship mass or anything else like that play a difference then? Maybe the 216 tonnes of cargo I had?

I would have thought that thrusters likely shouldn't have a difference in supercruise and was surprised by the difference it seemed to make at the time.

If I were back in the bubble, I'd be testing all this out right now myself. I'm not in the habit of making claims about these sort of things without some firsthand experience.

Cheers.

...

Either way, I'll be testing this out again more definitively just for my own peace of mind, when I make it back to the bubble. Could be a couple of weeks, or maybe even months though. Can't say for sure how long I'll be staying out.

 

[Fost]

SLOW DOWN isn't telling you to slow down, you're experiencing 'slowdown'.

I have played since beta and only just realised this. They should rename to something that makes better sense.

 

[Iskariot]

SC is a strange one to get used to. It's like someone cuts your break cable, whenever you get near your destination.. as soon as you're past your destination, your breaks get automatically fixed.

That is what it looks like, but from my experience that is an optical illusion.
Some people even think that your speed keeps increasing even if you throttle down, but that is not the case. The engine sounds don't help, because it sounds like you are accelerating too, but in fact your ship is slowing down.
Your ship slows down, but because you are closing in to your destination at extreme speed you perceive acceleration relative to your target even when you throttle down. As soon as you pass your target you no longer have an object to visually relate to and the optical illusion ends.

 

[Dialectic]

The blue zone is designed to speed match and is a throttle auto-pilot. It makes piloting in SC a lot easier when you consider the requirement to match velocities with stuff and drop out of superluminal velocities within 15km of something.
If there was no velocity matching, then even at 'only' 30km/s of SC velocity, the player would have a single-second window in which to disengage to drop to a station, for example.

If you want to overspeed then use the throttle setting to get some overspeed.

Sigh. I already said I have throttle above the blue line and it still auto decelerates to match the ship I'm chasing.

Edit: I watched some YouTube stuff on Supercruise. Explain to me how this helix maneuver makes any sense? It seems more like a maneuver to fake out the on board computers than anything else.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Sigh. I already said I have throttle above the blue line and it still auto decelerates to match the ship I'm chasing.

Edit: I watched some YouTube stuff on Supercruise. Explain to me how this helix maneuver makes any sense? It seems more like a maneuver to fake out the on board computers than anything else.

There is no 'auto-matching' of another ship's speed. The 'helix manouver' makes sense because you increase the total distance taken to the destination, giving you more time to slow down. Oh, try to drop the '' and such when you dont understand the basics of a fairly casual computer game.

 

[yodajedifishmaster]

We can aleady slow down and stop at places wtih no gravity pull. Why would it need planet sized gravity for us to stop at them? We can stop at nav beacons, wakes, and signal sources. All of which have no mass or density to them.

i have worked out why it happens. its not the uss. i happend to look at ssy map one time after this happened - in supercruise, nowhere near anything visible. for some reason i check the map, guess where my little blue doodah saying where i am is planted? right on an asteroid belt in the map. apparently i was slingshotted by the mass of the belt.

 

[DukeIronHand]

It's possible I could have gotten lucky/unlucky with the size of the stars I was scooping from when using and outfitting my Python for the Repair Jaques Station CG. It seemed like a fairly noticeable difference though. Does ship mass or anything else like that play a difference then? Maybe the 216 tonnes of cargo I had?

I would have thought that thrusters likely shouldn't have a difference in supercruise and was surprised by the difference it seemed to make at the time.

If I were back in the bubble, I'd be testing all this out right now myself. I'm not in the habit of making claims about these sort of things without some firsthand experience.

Cheers.

...

Either way, I'll be testing this out again more definitively just for my own peace of mind, when I make it back to the bubble. Could be a couple of weeks, or maybe even months though. Can't say for sure how long I'll be staying out.

If the situation avails itself please let us know how the testing went.
Could give it a go myself but at this point, since I specifically bought the A-rated Thruster as an experiment to improve SC agility, I am not trusting my judgement. It sure feels different.

 

[z993126]

The blue zone is designed to speed match and is a throttle auto-pilot.

There is no stopping in the red zone.

 

[DukeIronHand]

Unless the devs made a recent change, thruster class does not affect SC manoeuvrability.

Well sir it would appear you are (apparently) absolutely correct and I am delusional. Or the poor victim of "seek and ye shall find" mentality. Sure as heck felt different.

Searched this forum, searched Reddit, searched via Google, and the multiple hits that I obtained all state that nothing a player does or can do (module size, module class, Engineering) effect the SC agility of any ship. Whatever maneuverability a ship has in SC is "hard coded" or set by FD and nothing changes it. Unless some recent change was made and no one knows about it.

Well, guess I have a huge cash reserve built up in purchased big ship A-rated Thrusters. Lose very little jump range in the T9 going from D to A Thusters for example (less then .5 LY), that I might as well keep them and keep deluding myself that "I feel it man! I really do!" Plus I did some minor Engineering on them too.

 

[ZeroAi]

I have 500 hours in the game and I am sure at least half of them were spent in super cruise. And yet I still hate the way super cruise feels. You have almost no control over your overall speed. The ship slows down and speeds up whenever it wants to. I was trying to land on a planet. The ship randomly sped up at one point and than it gave me a "TOO FAST FOR ORBITAL CRUISE" message. It does this a lot. Fly by a random planet or space station? SLOW DOWN and than it forces your ship to lose all its speed even if that is not your destination. The ship has a nasty tendacy to speed up A LOT quicker than it slows down. If you have to go past a planet or station your ship loses all speed, once you clear the planet or station it speeds back up again so quickly you can easily overshoot your target.

Also the "slow down" message is 110% usless. It only exhist to rub it in your face that you are going to overshoot your target. It should say "Lol your over shot" instead of "Slow Down" A easy fix for this would be have it play a audio sound and say slow down when your 11 seconds away from your target.

You spend a lot of time in orbital cruise but I still find it one of the worst parts of travelling. It feels so random and like you have almost no control of the veloicty of your ship. I feel a easy solution would to be give us more control over our speed and make the slow down warning come earlier.

EDIT: I NEARLY FORGOT! Can we please not start off going near full speed when we drop out of frame shift!? I jump to a different system, take a sip or water or have to look away from the screen for two seconds and than "EMERGENCY DROP, TOO CLOSE!" and I smack into a sun.

Yeah, we need a supercruise auto-pilot, but...

even a "auto turn away from sun towards destination" option would be cool! Why wouldn't this be built-in in 3303 - seems like a safety issue?

We also could use "supercruise cruise control" so we don't uncontrollably fly past planets and are then forced to do an "e turn" (Elite Turn) - when I'm streaming I get lose in the conversation quite often and perform a lot of e turns lol!

So the cruise control in my car does not deviate by more than a couple of MPH when I go up and down BIG hills, so why can't we have this in 3303 with Supercruise so we don't accelerate out of control near every gravity well?

I'm ok if this requires buying a Supercruise Cruise Control Computer (SCCC) module, as long as (unlike the docking computer) I don't have to strap the little SCCC module in the middle of a cargo bay made to hold 2 tons of cargo!

 

[Doolittle]

It was just another bad mechanic based on the decision to make the game MP and put it on console. Making ED just another Elite clone.

 

[ick]

There is no stopping in the red zone.

There is no stopping in the white zone Betty! The white zone is for loading and unloading only.

 

[Ian Phillips]

It was just another bad mechanic based on the decision to make the game MP and put it on console. Making ED just another Elite clone.

You have that wrong.

Supercruise is the result of the DDF en-masse disagreeing with Frontiers plan of having POI travel. They universally thought that was terrible, so Frontier replaced their POI plan with Supercruise. The game was envisioned and promoted as a Multiplayer game from day one, and supercruise has nothing/zero/nada/ to do with Bringing the game out on Xbox some 18 months after the PC release (with supercruise).

 

[WR3ND]

You have that wrong.

Supercruise is the result of the DDF en-masse disagreeing with Frontiers plan of having POI travel. They universally thought that was terrible, so Frontier replaced their POI plan with Supercruise. The game was envisioned and promoted as a Multiplayer game from day one, and supercruise has nothing/zero/nada/ to do with Bringing the game out on Xbox some 18 months after the PC release (with supercruise).

And I for one am at least very glad for it too. It adds a lot to the sense of immersion and freedom and to the scale of the game. It could be tweaked here or there I suppose with some of the UI or control elements, but overall it's a very compelling game mechanic. It would be difficult to imagine playing the game now with a finite POI travel mechanic for systems.

Heck, I'd like it if we could have interstellar travel too instead of just jumping between systems. Permits be damned if players are willing to make the trek, I say. Have system security try and do something about it.

 

[Zorronov]

I've been flying in SC from a 3rd person view lately and, if you do that, you will notice that your thrusters aren't even on. But my question is...has anyone noticed a change in FSD sound and acceleration when entering a shipping lane? I may be space happy, but I can tell when that shipping lane light is coming on nearly every time now.

 

[DukeIronHand]

I've been flying in SC from a 3rd person view lately and, if you do that, you will notice that your thrusters aren't even on. But my question is...has anyone noticed a change in FSD sound and acceleration when entering a shipping lane? I may be space happy, but I can tell when that shipping lane light is coming on nearly every time now.

Yes indeed.
The sound (pitch?) changes with multiple in-flight events with leaving the "shipping lane" and entering "deep space" being one of them.
You can actually learn a lot about the "mechanics" of what is happening and when in SC by the sound.

 

[Ian Skippy]

I've been flying in SC from a 3rd person view lately and, if you do that, you will notice that your thrusters aren't even on.

Disable them in SC and see what happens.

 

[WR3ND]

Disable them in SC and see what happens.

I've accidentally done that a couple times before back when I used to power off modules instead of logging off on distant exploration trips.

I guess the going game lore theory behind it is that our FSDs "warp" space, but our thrusters still propel us through it.

 

[FurtivePygmy]

I will admit to only skimming though most of this thread, but I would point out a couple things in reference to OP:

First, I agree that supercruise feels a bit weird to me, even after hundreds of hours. That doesn't mean I haven't learned to manipulate the mechanics to their fullest, using gravity braking, the acceleration mechanics to stay away from interdictions, etc, but even while I'm doing it, it feels weird.

Secondly, I think this was clearly FD's way of solving the obvious problem of how you deal with such a range of velocities, from a few m/s in normal flight to hundreds of times the speed of light. They chose a sort of "automatic" solution that dynamically changes the range of your throttle output for any given situation. Personally, I like a bit more manual control. I like to drive a stick IRL, I like flying FA off, etc. In other games, like the Evochron series, the approach is to simply implement a pilot selected range multiplier to determine how "sensitive" throttle adjustments are. Star citizen also tried something like this initially to provide different "classes" of handling, from precision for landing to cruising speed for long travel. Obviously the downside to this is that it puts more pressure on the pilot to correctly control the ship (potentially leading to much frustration with the already sort of steep learning curve).

Although I like those solutions in terms of giving me control, I actually really wish that we could have both, or something like the supercruise equivalent of FA off. I do sometimes really like having the computer handle throttle on approach to a station or body, makes my job easier, just like flight assist, but I'd also really appreciate the ability to turn that interference off when I want or need more manual control. Maybe I am pointing out into the black for 10 min for some 500,000 ls body and don't want to slow down for every planet and station in the way. It would also be absolutely awesome for making chasing and interdicting people in SC much more entertaining. As it is now, there are too many "follow ship in front of me until it reaches half way point to its destination and starts automatically slowing down so I can catch up" moments. Perhaps the quarry would like to avoid be caught up with and try to come into the station really hot (risking overshoot) and perhaps the hunter would like to try to catch the prey quickly without being auto-limited by the mass of the body behind them. It would make supercruise feel much more like piloting because I'd be doing something more intricate and attention demanding than just pointing in a direction and waiting.

So while I agree with others as well that learning to best make use of supercruise as implemented is part of the skill curve in Elite, I think it would be a much more engaging and interesting skill curve to have a more dangerous (i.e. less automatic) version of supercruise.

Note: I also really wish we could just crash into bodies and die, rather than being auto-dropped for safety. Seriously, this was one of my favorite things about Evochron, that an ill-plotted hyperspace jump could land you inside or too close to something and instant death. Always felt like that scene in Star Wars, "Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova." Could make the space life feel a lot more spicy

 

[Kyokushin]

I have 500 hours in the game and I am sure at least half of them were spent in super cruise. And yet I still hate the way super cruise feels. You have almost no control over your overall speed. The ship slows down and speeds up whenever it wants to. I was trying to land on a planet. The ship randomly sped up at one point and than it gave me a "TOO FAST FOR ORBITAL CRUISE" message. It does this a lot. Fly by a random planet or space station? SLOW DOWN and than it forces your ship to lose all its speed even if that is not your destination. The ship has a nasty tendacy to speed up A LOT quicker than it slows down. If you have to go past a planet or station your ship loses all speed, once you clear the planet or station it speeds back up again so quickly you can easily overshoot your target.

Also the "slow down" message is 110% usless. It only exhist to rub it in your face that you are going to overshoot your target. It should say "Lol your over shot" instead of "Slow Down" A easy fix for this would be have it play a audio sound and say slow down when your 11 seconds away from your target.

You spend a lot of time in orbital cruise but I still find it one of the worst parts of travelling. It feels so random and like you have almost no control of the veloicty of your ship. I feel a easy solution would to be give us more control over our speed and make the slow down warning come earlier.

EDIT: I NEARLY FORGOT! Can we please not start off going near full speed when we drop out of frame shift!? I jump to a different system, take a sip or water or have to look away from the screen for two seconds and than "EMERGENCY DROP, TOO CLOSE!" and I smack into a sun.

I love supercruise. Thats how travelling should be done.

I like to fly around the solar system with speed few times higher than light. I am loving it, and that whole idea about mass, slowing/accelerating is good.
I have played almost 3000 hours in that game and i am still like it, and i am playing it BECAUSE is like the supercruise. I have no issue with that. Maybe only message 'slow down' should appear BEFORE it will be late to slow than, than AFTER.