Fighting

There seem to exist a lot of misunderstandings with respect to fighting. The first one is, that your movement vector has to point to your enemy to move towards him. This is not true. Your movement vector is shown as the vector of your movement with respect to the currently selected reference mass. This is totally insignificant for a fight, because there only the relative velocities of the fighting ships count. This also means, that you don't have to decelerate for a fight. Your attacker will have a similar velocity vector as you or he wouldn't stay in your vicinity for long. Important are the tiny differences in your movement vectors that result in movements of your ships relative to each other. If you both fly parallel with #math145#10, 000  m/s in the same direction and accelerate towards each other, this will have the same effect as when you don't move at all and accelerate towards each other. What counts is the resulting relative movement. To make a long story short: Simply ignore your displayed velocity during a fight. It doesn't matter at all!

What does count is your velocity relative to the attacking ships. You cannot measure it directly, but you can select an attacking ship and watch the distance change to get an estimate of your velocity. This is the only velocity information that helps you to maneuver during a fight.

• Always switch your engines off while fighting and use mouse direction control and acceleration/deceleration buttons for maneuvering.
• Ignore the indication of your velocity vector. It is insignificant for a fight.
• Be careful not to shoot yourself with your own turret mounted lasers.
• If you attack a ship with your front laser, aim 5 deg past it, accelerate until near, decelerate and follow accelerating while it flies by. Shoot it from behind.
• You can shoot incoming missiles: evade with full thrusters, u-turn, select with annotation (to make the missile visible) and shoot.

• When the attack warning comes up, stop time.
• Switch off your engines.
• Select the outside view of your ship and zoom out as far as possible.
• Switch on the id labels to identify the attacker.
• Move the outside view until the attacker rotates into your view.
• Select the attacker and activate your radar scanner to get type and damage info.
• Remember the position of the attacker on your scanner.
• Switch back to the front view.
• Restart time.
• If you use your front laser, rotate your ship to face the attacker and use your engines to accelerate at the same time to evade the initial attack.
• Perform any maneuvers necessary and shoot to get rid of the attacker.
• Select the system map and reselect your initial target.