2941

I started near there too Spock. My first major trip took me to Zeta Aquilae (which if you’ve played Descent should be familiar!) and that was my first major hub for a while. I definitely got there in a stock Sidewinder. Search for that system in the Navigation tab on the Galaxy Map, click on the system in the map, and select the Plot Route icon that appears. Make sure your CARGO MASS setting (bottom left) is set to 0.00 tonnes. It will then plot the route to that system (in brown on the map).

I’m in Gilgamesh right now, which isn’t that far from you (37.7 Ly) and according to my map the longest single jump is about 8 Ly, so it’s definitely within range of your Sidewinder unless you have serious mass issues!

[edit] JMR is right of course, make sure you stop along the way to refuel. Any system with a listed population should have a station.

2942

Game seems to have a steeper learning curve than EVE.

Login, try to play with joypad and find out that it isn’t really optimal so I go back to keyboard/mouse. Eventually manage to fly towards a different system using supercruise, end up flying around a bit until I see where the waypoint is… overshoot it several times as the button used to activate it, or the throttle, doesn’t seem to disable it, find a forum thread that tells me to press ‘c’ which does nothing, but another that tells me it is the ‘j’ button.

Find the space station I want to visit, activate it on the left-hud, but there is no dock option, I fly closer and get a warning and infraction, I fly away and look around on the left hud, find a different hud screen on the left side hud that has the ‘docking’ option, I enter the station and am told to dock at 44. Only a few numbers lighted up, but as I fly in closer I find the correct landing pad. Meanwhile 3 ships are blown up around me inside the station.

I fly towards the docking beacon thingy that lights up… but do not get the “docking” computer switch, so I move up, down, left, right, left right, forward, backward until I get ‘tone’ and proceed to try to put my big ship in the circle… which it seems to be, the clock is ticking down, I try repeatedly to get it to land, but it seems to be something wrong so it will never connect despite it being in the circle, so maybe my ship has the wrong orientation and I try the other 3 “directions” in case there is a ‘face this way to dock’ on the pad.

Eventually I decide that this isn’t working, maybe I should try to ‘redock’ so I pull up the left side hud and cancel my docking attempt and quickly ask for another…
Now a different screen tells me that I am in violation of docking and am fined 500 credits, with 20 second countdown. So I try to fly out of the station.

And I become the 4th ship blown up inside the station in 6 minutes.

2943

I have done that exact thing before when I started playing, instant0.

It sounds like you found the docking option in the left hud menu. I have noticed the lighted numbers for docking bays go out sometimes, but normally using yaw to rotate around will make them come back, I believe.

On the actual docking, it does matter that once you get into the detailed zoom in your scanner when you are close to the docking bay where it shows the picture of your ship and the red/blue colors for when you are lined up that your ship does indeed need to be facing forward and also make sure you are down all the way. In my early days, I would just slowly fly in until I was above the dock and hit X to set 0 speed. Then I would use the down thruster slowly in small bursts until I got to the ground and using left and right thrust on the keyboard to position properly. If I wasn’t orientated properly, many times I would down thrust until I would be scraping metal on the floor, but it didn’t seem to matter much and then just Yaw (spin) around until it was facing properly and it would dock. If I was too far forward or back, I would accelerate very slowly forward or backward with my finger on the X key to stop immediately if I over did it on the thrusters.

I have no idea if that helps or not, but that is what I recall and figured it may help until you get the hang of things :). Heck, I still dock in this manner many times, heh.

2944

First off, don’t forget there is a Docking training mission you can practice all you want, in the Training menu!

As to helping you in-game: navigating the panels can definitely be tricky, but here’s how you request docking permission with a stock keyboard setup. First make sure you’re <= 7.50 km away. You can start this process before 7.5 km if when you request permission you’re closer than 7.5. Slow down if you need to. Go into a full stop if you need to (default key ‘X’)!

Hold left shift and then press ‘A’ to pull up the left panel.

Now the thing to note is that each panel can have tabs on it. You navigate the panel tabs by using ‘Q’ and ‘E’ to move the selection left and right. You navigate left and right within a tab by hitting ‘A’ and ‘D’. You navigate up and down in a list by using ‘W’ and ‘S’, with hitting the spacebar as select. So in general terms, on a panel you use ‘Q’ and ‘E’ to get to the tab you want, ‘A’ and ‘D’ to get to the area within the tab you want, ‘W’ and ‘S’ to move up and down lists to the item you want, and spacebar to select it.

For landing permission:

Tap ‘E’ to tab to the right until you have the ‘Contacts’ tab highlighted. Then hit ‘S’ until the station is highlighted. Hit spacebar to talk to them. There will be 3 choices (I think ‘Lock Target’, ‘Request Docking Permission,’ and ‘Cancel.’ Hit ‘S’ and ‘W’ until ‘Request Docking Permission’ is highlighted. Hit spacebar. Then tab your left shift again to get out of the screen.

This should leave you with docking permission, and the your docking pad and the landing countdown should be displayed just below your viewport in the middle of your screen.

2945

instant0, in addition to Kelan’s excellent and specific suggestions, I would say more generally: yes, this game is unforgiving. I would suggest that if you want to get better at docking and landing without the risk of getting blown up, do so in the tutorials. You’ll get to the point where you’re more proficient and then when you dock and land in the game, the time allotted will seem more than sufficient.

There’s also a travel tutorial, though you can mess up in traveling in-game (as you’ve done) without great risk. The best advice I received from this forum about travel is to keep your throttle in the blue zone during SC and hyperspace, then throttle down near arrival to keep the estimated time left at :06-:08 seconds. Then you won’t overshoot. Works every time.

EDIT: ninja’d by Charlatan about the tutorials!

2946

Yeah! That was fun! We need to get more folks together sometime. I was glad you got the kills on some of those after our bad luck the last time. I have to work the next two days so won’t be on much until Sunday unfortunately.

Now that I am getting the hang of the game a bit, I am wondering if the federation is the faction I want to be working on. Up until now I have just been taking whatever missions I can get while bounty hunting to get a decent ship and modules, but I have no idea if I really want to go up in ranks with the federation. This game is so wide open that it will be hard to get us all on the same page, but I am curious if there are others that want to band together in one system/area and work on a certain faction together.

For now, though, I am hanging around Gilgamesh, which was a recent gathering point for some folks and at least krayzkrok and I have got into some fighting together. Anyone else have any ideas on something that may be fun to work on as a group? Even just picking a faction and area would be cool and perhaps we could run defense for each other on mining operations or other calls for help that people might need. Being close to the same system opens up more options at least. I know at least for myself I don’t really have time to buzz 100 LY and still have time to play in a game session so already being in a system with others nearby helps me a lot.

Another thing that seems like it could be fun to try someday (not sure if it would be in practice, though) is to delve deep into an uncharted part of the galaxy and set up shop somewhere lucrative and hang out as a group in that area for a while. I have no idea if that fits in with this game or not, but the idea intrigues me sort of like a wormhole would be in Eve Online or something. I wonder if this could work and whether there would be any money to be made doing this. Even if not, it may be an enjoyable adventure.

2947

I haven’t logged in this morning, but by the looks of the Frontier official forum, the server problems of yesterday are still problems, and folks are going apeshit. It seems that Frontier had no one minding the store because it was a bank holiday. No dev has responded about the problems AFAIK.

Some folks on the forum make the point (that I happen to agree with) that if they release an online game a few weeks before the holidays, even a small team should have someone around during the holidays.

What draws my concern most, though, is that apparently some clever folks figured out an exploit because of the server woes that netted them millions, and the exploit was even posted on the forum so more joined in. Now others are calling on Frontier to do a pre-Jan. 1 rollback.

The whole thing seems a bit of a mess now, and Frontier hopefully will announce something today.

2948

Something like this would be fun. Perhaps we could agree upon a distant destination at agree to meet there by a certain date, keeping in contact en route in case we discovered something interesting. It would certainly improve our exploration status!

Another day on the Frontier forums. No wonder it’s hard to take these people seriously.

They should certainly roll back everyone who obviously used the exploit, while everyone else should continue as normal. Otherwise this sets a precedent for not knowing whether you’re wasting your time because some jokers on a forum somewhere are screwing around.

2949

Try logging back in, I wouldn’t be surprised if you have your money. All my transactions (selling exploration data, munitions costs, purchasing beam lasers) ended up going through but I had to log off for a good 10 minutes or so before it all was sorted.

2950

I’m honestly not sure, but I think it’s okay now. During the server fuckery, it made me spend at least 30k to repair myself multiple times, plus I purchased a better KWS so I lost track. I think those losses were still reflected when I logged in earlier this morning.

2951

I tried that a few times last night. I not sure if i got my money back. Its weird, my money went down again but my cargo was full again. I’m not worried about the loss. It’s crazy this hasn’t been addressed yet. Who unplugged the bat phone?

Edit: just completed a 4 stop trade loop. Everything seemed fine. Still out a few space bucks though.

2952

I do hope they learn a lesson about support for their not-an-MMO, no-offline-mode and always online title. You’re now running a 24x7 service guys, you can’t walk away for the weekend without contingency in place.

2953

I think it was here that someone posted a link to a 200-page fan-made 'pdf that was supposedly more comprehensive than the manual. Now that I’ve jumped off the fence, can someone repost it, please?

2954

That might be the one? And it seems that Frontier are away until the 5th (or so i read), so don’t go using that exploit and maybe don’t go doing lots of difficult stuff just in case the problem is a big problem and they work out they do need to do a wipe. And i echo sharaleo on how crazy it is to have an on-line MMO type game and week after launch all (seemingly) go on holiday!!! Welcome to the British way of doing things ;)

2955

The server problems seemed to get resolved for me last night, so I think someone was manning the fort. My issues had largely disappeared by the time I logged out around 10:00pm MST (05:00GMT). A quick browse of the forums make it sound like the servers are working much better currently, but I’m at work so I can’t speak from personal experience. Maybe it’s the fanboy crew talking in the server status thread I looked at (EDIT: Yep, from looking on Reddit seems like there’s still issues. Sigh.).

Either way, there definitely was a deafening lack of communication with the playerbase. It’s understandable to have problems and it’s also understandable that you’re going to be running with a skeleton crew on New Years, but it wouldn’t have hurt to keep people updated on the issue via the forums.

2956

Thanks for the advice, Krayzkrok! It’s working great. I’m halfway to Zeta Aquilae now, and I’ve already sold much of my exploration data. I’ve been running empty, so cargo mass isn’t an issue, but I do know how to use the cargo-slider in the navigation menu to test my range with various cargo loads. I’m now up to 55,000 credits or so now. Appreciate the help!

2957

Yes, Forgers guide. That’s it.

2958

Glad you found your path! Perhaps we’ll see you out there, I’m mostly playing on Veloxi group these days. I might not see many people, but those that I do see will be worth seeing.

I’ve now upgraded my Cobra’s measly pulse lasers to hull-cooking beam lasers, and replaced my pea-shooting gimballed burst laser with a freakin’ missile launcher! YES. With my ECM completing the picture, I’m reading to start banging some more pirate heads together. I still have my mining laser and refinery for a change of pace. Time to power up the reactor and see what I can find…

2959

Krayzkrok, grats on the new weaponry. I’m curious: When you are offered a pirate mission, how do you know how challenging the enemies will be?

I’m HAL 9001 in the game. I’ve been playing both on JPINARD and Veloxi. I rarely see anyone, and I don’t know how to say hello. :)

2960

Open the comms panel, select the friend or local ship, then choose text chat. Friend req incoming from Queebatron.