Elite Pilot's Academy

For supercruising around the Stars I am joined my Commander Jack Weaver.

 

Here's the image that I took when exiting hyperspace... 

In this episode I am joined by Commander Kerrash who helps me with Docking and Landing

In today's Episode I am joined by Commander PhoenixDfire, who helps me as my wingman as we step into the first solo mission in Elite Dangerous and get to grips with Elite Dangerous's flight controls...

In this episode we enter the cockpit of the Faulcon Delacy Sidewinder and have a look around. The Sidewinder Owners Manual may be of interest to some listeners. http://elite.frontier.co.uk/downloads/Sidewinder_Owners_Manual_WIP.pdf

In this first episode we look at the settings and controls of Elite Dangerous.

Shownotes

Before you even enter the cockpit it makes sense to get familiar with the controls of your ship. I will not specifially tell you what buttons to press since they can all be configured. I do however want to help explain some of the less obvious controls to help getting you flying...

Go through the options

pretty much self explanatory 

however the option 'amd crash fix' is no longer needed. It used to remove the planets from the game because they were causing some older amd graphics cards to crash. This has been fixed. so set it to off...

Pilot Gender - can only be set before entering the game - but you can change it ;)

Before going into details about individual controls I want to mention that Elite Dangerous can be controlled in various ways from your pc.

Keyboard only.

Go old school and play elite as you remember it from 1984. It IS possible however being a contortionist may be handy!

Keyboard and mouse

Use your mouse as a virtual joystick. Please remember this is not like playing a first person shooter. Your mouse acts like a joystick. I.E. pull down to pitch up and so on....

Game Pad

ED works very well when played with a gamepad, this is a common method for the Frontier Devs to use and works very well with a good game pad and plenty of buttons.

Joystick

Purely personal opinion, but Elite Dangerous is a flight sim. Airplanes are controlled using joysticks and so should Elite Dangerous. Even better, get a 'HOTAS' (Hands on Throttle and Stick) controller for even more realism.

Go through the controls

Yaw - Picture your vehicle with 3 axis running through it. The x axis, which stretches from wing to wing, the y axis which goes from the nose of your ship to the engines and finally the z axis which goes from the top of your ship to the bottom. Yaw is when your ship rotates along the Z axis. I.E. yaw to your right and your ships nose turn horizontally to the right. I will not get in to how Frontier Development have 'nerfed' yaw. The reasoning is that they want Elite Dangerous' flight model to feel like World War 2 in space since they consider that more fun. They do not want the game to be 'turrets in space' etc...

Roll - Rolling is turning along the Y axis, I.E. if you roll to your right, you ship will rotate in a clock wise direction.

Pitch - Finally pitching is when you turn along the X axis. Pitch up and your ship will rotate upwards. Please note that usually in flight sims, (as well as in real aircraft) in order to pitch up you actually pull back on your stick!

Thrust is hopefully self explanatory. Thrust up to go up, down to go down and so on...

Throttle

Throttle Range

Full range means the full back your ship goes maximum reverse. Full forward means you go maximum forward and when you are in the middle you are stopped. Forward only means that when your throttle is all the way back you have 0 acceleration.

Reverse throttle - if your throttle is set to 'forward only' you can swap full forward to meaning full backward by pressing this.

Flight Landing overrides

Some people may want to have different controls when their landing gear is down this area allows that to be set.

Disable flight assist - Usually your ship will fly like an airplane. (all be it with some other fancy stuff i.e. thrusting or the ability to fly backwards). Basically you point at somewhere and accelerate, you will go there. Turning off flight assistance will put your ship into a more Newtonian flight mode. Meaning that your vector of travel may not necessarily match the way you are facing. For example you could fly along the top of a capital ship but disable flight assist. You can then pitch down and do a strafing run on that ship... Please note for every reaction you need an equal and opposite reaction. So if yo(continued)

Introductory Episode where I outline the goals of the Elite Pilot's Academy