Okay, so I am assuming you have done the basic tutorial missions. You haven’t? Well, do them! No arguments. They teach you the basic basics. What’s the difference between this and those? The same difference between driving lessons and road experience. One gets you a licence, the other keeps you alive afterwards.
Having left a station, you want to travel the galaxy. Knowing how to get around, explore and find things and places is essential.
Modes of flight
When you leave a station you are flying in normal space. You maximum speed is dictated by your ships thrusters. In this mode of travel you can only fly around the immediate area. This may be the space around a station, a Resource Extraction Site or the area around a navigation beacon or other place of interest.
To travel further, you must travel much faster. To do this you must engage your FrameShift drive and enter super-cruise. Your drive takes 15 seconds to charge, then counts down from 5 and boom! You’re away.
You cannot fire your weapons or otherwise interact with other ships in this mode of travel, unless you have a FrameShift Interdictor, but you can scan ships to determine their identity and you can scan planets for exploration data.
As you fly away from planets, stars or other bodies their gravitational well fades and your ship accelerates. Your speed starts in km/s, but very quickly hits light speed (“c”) and can reach over 1,000 times light speed on long trips. This mode of travel is used to move around within star systems. You cannot travel between star systems using super-cruise.
The final mode of travel is hyperspace. This allows you to travel 10s of light years in a single jump that lasts only ten seconds. FrameShift engages the same way as super-cruise, but this time you must target a star system within range. Your jump-range is decided by the weight of your ship and the size and rating of your FrameShift drive. We'll look more at this when covering how to get around the galaxy.
Making an approach
In super-cruise you may see planets, stations and a variety of signal sources. You can select them as your destination by pressing the target button. Once you've done this you need to decelerate in super-cruise and get to within 1,000km of the target before you can drop back into normal space. See below.
Things you might find in Super-Cruise
As you fly in super-cruise various things appear on your target scanner in the HUD, or on the Contacts TAB on the left instrument panel. These can all be visited by dropping into normal space and investigating.
