The starter ship, at least initially, is not equipped for anything other than hovering flight with some thrust vectoring for velocity. So yes, it has a natural tendency to want to return to a stable hover and the controls must be displaced and held to get it to go anywhere. That is why you start out on that small island with destinations that are only 4 or 5KM away at the maximum…since you don’t have the ability to transition to forward/winged flight. Once you have earned enough money and find the right base to upgrade, you can equip the Scarab with wings that unfold, then you will be able to toggle between hover flight mode and fixed wing mode…
Make sure you’ve also mapped the “shifted” state of the controls. I had a button that I would push that would change it from coarse movements to fine movements…it does make precision landings much easier in my opinion.
You may want to check and see if you are stuck in translation mode (ie like a spacecraft, forward just moves you forward with very minimal pitch change). IIRC the default control binding is set to translation mode versus pitch control on your joystick. All you need to do is assign your axis’s to the VTOL/airplane mode instead, and then use a modifier (I just hold the pinky switch) to activate translation mode for fine control for landing. No curves etc needed.
The first ship isn’t super fast, but it definitely shouldn’t feel like a crawl either. It really reminds me of flying a helo overall. I actually really appreciate it’s nimbleness and in some of the later canyon mapping missions, it’s a definite plus to be that spry.
Let me know if you’re having issues with your controller setup and I can post some screenshots.
Ah…good find…! That may indeed be what is going on…it is defaulting to that stable hover control. I found I liked having to actually use the shift mode (hold a button down) to stay in the stable hover mode and spent most of my time not using that mode until the last few seconds of landing or taking off…
I’ll check things after dinner gets sorted, so this is from memory. I believe that is correct, but verify it’s not dual assigned to another axis in the same flight mode menu. IIRC you have three flight mode control tabs (basic, add1 and add2 I think?), you want to have your different controls spread across all three, not on the same tab.
On your throttle IIRC it’s under calibration to set either midpoint or full range. I’ll verify that this evening though.
Good! If your axis’s seem to be working correctly now. Add a flight mode modifier (I use the pinky switch on my stick) and then assign your axis’s to the second flight mode in the add1 tab. I basically have VTOL and airplane (ie pitch and roll) as basic mode, and translation mode as my modified mode. That way I can much more precise landing and I can taxi a lot easier as well (translation can make for a VERY fast taxi so be careful).
Ha…I just used the W and S keys to taxi I think and used my rudder pedals to steer. Otherwise I sometimes screwed up and didn’t use the shifted mode and some interesting thing can happen if you are in that non-translational control mode…
FPV (Flight Path Vector) so you can tell exactly where the ship is moving towards regardless of orientation.
ILS (Instrument Landing System) - When you target a base that has a runway the HUD will display a virtual runway and two lines (horizontal and vertical) which show your alignment with the runway.
An option to switch between metric and imperial units
(Speed, distance, altitude: m/s, km, m vs knots, miles, feet).(edited)
