Episode 1 - Preflight

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 you pitch down for 1 second, you will need to pitch up for 1 second to stop pitching down. Weapons We have two fire buttons that can be configured however you want them. I.E. one for guns and one for missiles. The fire groups  are how you configure each button. When you are inside your vehicle one of the panels on the right hand side allows this to be configured. Silent running In Elite Dangerous the primary passive sensor is heat. Anything that you do, generates heat. Turn on you engines, heat, boost heat, fire a gun heat. You get the idea... in order to stop you from cooking inside your space ship that heat gets radiated out into space. This heat is then detected and you can be seen on other people's sensors... It is possible for your ship to stop radiating that heat out into space. HOWEVER doing so will drastically increase your internal heat and it is only a matter of time before all that heat starts damaging your systems and eventually you will die... Along with silent running you can also purchase heat sinks as an upgrade for your ship. These will collect your ships heat into the heat sink and eject that into space. These are currently the only way to disrupt heat seeking missiles and other heat tracking items. Power management ED allows us to manage the flow of power through our systems. You can divert it to your engines, meaning you fly faster and turn tighter. You can divert it to your weapons meaning that your energy weapons will recharge faster. You can divert it to your systems meaning that your shields recharge faster and are stronger. Head look pressing this lets you look around your cockpit well worth doing just for the eye candy! You have 3 main panels in your ship Looking left you have the target panel, which contains your navigation information, a list of ships / space stations in sensor range, the ability to communicate with something (I.E. requesting permission to dock) The subtargets of that item and finally the cargo of that item. Looking to your right is the systems panel. Your status, telling you basic information about yourself. Your modules. I will talk about these in another episode but basically this is the health of your ship. Your firegroups where you can configure your weapons. Your cargo, including the ability to eject some of it. And finally your functions which currently feels like a dumping ground for you to set some stuff including deploying your landing gear or cargo scoop Finally looking straight ahead there is the sensors panel, which is your main sensor, to the left of that is some target information and to the right is some information about your current ship