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Basic Flight Controls

On the H.U.D. a gyro cursor hovers around your ship, it looks kind of like two capital T's head to head. This is your desired facing direction. Use the mouse or Rotate Left/Rotate Right controls on your console (default Left/Right Arrows) to rotate this. The ship will turn to face the cursor. Large ships will turn more slowly than small fighter craft, and very large ships can be very slow to turn.

The Thrust control (default Right Mouse Button) will activate the thrusters and push your ship forwards. Double click the thrust control to engage cruise control and lock the thrusters as active until the control is pressed again.

Thrusters will usually drain a little bit of energy. If your batteries are very low, you should ideally stop moving to recharge faster. Rotating does not use any energy.

Navigation

Sooner or later, you will want to explore the galaxy. A Starstandard galactic map computer is built into the console of every ship and shows space stations, and other points of interest like asteroid fields. The novice pilot will see large areas of unexplored sectors. If your ship is fitted with a tracking scanner, targets will be visible providing they are in explored areas.

Press the Activate Map control (default Space) to toggle the map. You can use this control in the space station or ship status screens too.

Press the Map Legend control (default L) to toggle labels.

Use the arrow keys or the mouse to move the hyperspace destination, represented by the red circle. Information including your current and destination sectors is shown in the top right hand corner of the screen. A message will appear there if your destination is out of range so be on the lookout for it if you move too far. Close the map and it will remember your destination.

When the map is closed, press the Activate Hyperdrive control on your console (default H) to activate the hyperdrive. A green dance of fractions will form and after a short delay you will starstream forwards at a speed of -1. An instant later your vessel will appear in the destination sector.

The main source of power for any hyperdrive is internal, and not linked to the main generator on your ship. This is because hyperdrives require a unique type of energy called gate energy. A hyperdrive will require time to recharge before you can use it again, and when recharging a flashing arrow will appear on the H.U.D.

Targeting

It is hard to get lost in the small sectors of the flat galaxy, but accidents do happen. Targeting is an important skill for any pilot. A ship can have many targets, but as pilot only the primary one is visible (any other targets are strictly for any turret gunners or fighter pilots at your command).

When a target is set, a diamond will appear on your H.U.D. floating around your ship like the gryo cursor. This indicates the direction to the target. The name of the target will appear in the top left corner of the H.U.D. for your convenience.

Most (if not all) space stations emit a special homing signal that makes it easy for ships to find them, no matter how distant. Ships or other objects need to be in radar range (or at least visible on the screen) before you can target them.

Press the Target Base control (default B) and your H.U.D. will target a base. Bases always appear on an outer rim of a sector. It is possible, in fact quite likely, that several bases will be in a sector at once. Press the Target Base control more than once to switch between any bases present.

Press the Target Nearest Ship control (default T) to target the nearest object, which could be a space vessel or something else like a Staytite cargo pod or even a lump of space rock.

Press the Target Nearest Enemy control (default Y) to target the nearest vessel that is attacking you.

When a target is selected, press the Previous Target or Next Target controls (default , and .) to cycle through the targets that are in range.

Press the Clear Targets control (default C) to clear all targets.

If a scanner is fitted to your ship, you can press the Scan control (default S) to probe your current target for information. Probing others is relatively harmless, but being probed is not very pleasant.

Tractor Beams

Cargo pods, small rocks, life pods and many other things can be pulled, tractored and taken aboard your ship if you have the correct equipment. Scoops, tractors or assimilators are beams fitted to the front of your ship that will suck in the object you target.

Different tractor beams do different things. Some will extract cargo from the target, some will refine what you scoop which is useful if you want to make a bit of money by asteroid grabbing. Police forces use a scoop to grab live people by sucking up the yellow and black lifepods that are jettisonned from ships. Some tractor beams don't scoop, they just pull.

Hold the Tractor Beam control (default Middle Mouse, or Right Shift if your mouse has two buttons) to activate the beam. This will drag the primary target towards the beam. Point towards the target to get the maximum pull. Keep holding the beam and you will eventually suck up the object.

Different scoops have different size limits. You cannot hope to scoop up that space station, but scooping a small space ship might just be possible. A standard cargo pod is 5t and life pods are 10t.