Did you see the vid of the guy taking contraband into a station? It's awesome. Will find it...

Been doing a mixture of Cargo runs and some bulletin board missions that pay quite well esp the ones where this is no cargo space requirement. Have been attacked once by a pirate in a Cobra Mk III - killed him and that earn't me 6000 cr (ish)

Do you guys fly with flight assist on? Been watching the videos from the guy I posted. He does all his flying with flight assist off. Did a good video to show what it means too. Would love to give it a go.

I'm tempted to pick up a Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS and a copy of Elite. Maybe I can delay a month until my birthday

So far all with assist on - I think assist off gives you more options - but will be harder

The channel I linked has a tutorial vid. He basically says that you don't really get anything extra.

I suppose you can do more fancy manoeuvres when trying to out fly someone in combat etc...

Starting to get the hang of joystick and found a good "guide" & set of bindings from someone for it

Had a couple of battles and been able to upgrade with a gimballed laser - as soon as I can afford another one I will gte that - although maybe mix 1 x laser and 1 x cannon and slave them to different fire controls

Would I be right in thinking that ones good against shields and one is good against hull/armor?

To a degree, yes. Everything damages everything so you can get by just with one or the other, but lasers take shields down faster than kinetic weapons, and the reverse is true of hull armour.

Well tried it last night

Was “Indicted” on a SuperCruise to a space station. The other ship was bigger than me a did a bit of damage to me early on. However I had slaved my Laser to primary fire and muti-cannon (the smallest projectile gun) to the secondary. Both now Gimbal mounted

Used Laser to take shields down and to snipe at longer rage. When I got closer opened up with both guns and was able to take him down – 12K Cr reward (although hull was down to 48% and that cost just over 1100cr to fix (and 400Cr worth of ammo)

Only thing I am a bit miffed with is I did not have time to use my new Bounty scanner so might have missed out on more bounty – but he had taken my shields down with his 1st pass and knocked a good 20% off my hull so I did not want to hang around trying to scan him while he took pop shots at me


I have now “sold” my Discovery scanner and bought an extra 2T of cargo so I now have 6T of cargo space

..and an update

Took on a large hauler type ship and although I managed to destroy it (8K cr bounty) it knocked my ship down to about 10% hull. At the very end it shattered my cockpit glass and then the life support timer starts counting down for 5 mins (as I guess you are in a Vac suit). Anyway not that far from a station so Supercruised to it (and managed not to overshoot) and boostied in with just under 30s of life support left. Once I had paid for the repair, re-ammo etc I guess I made about 2K cr profit

Yep, if your shields go down there's a risk your canopy/screen will get shattered. At that point emergency life support kicks in and you have a short period to get to a landing pad before you die. The amount of time you get depends on the grade of life support in your ship - I think it goes from 5 mins for 'e' grade to 25 mins for 'a' grade ('a' grade life support is really expensive though..).

if you sit in space and turn all your systems off, you get more and more cold and ice crystals form on your canopy. It's rather cool .

Must try the silent running and this (and flight assist off) so that when I pick up some cargo I can get into the space station without being scanned

Last night used the "Target a system" function on a ship - took out its drives so it was helpless in space - then able to go behind it and destroy it without it being able to shoot me. One of the system you can target is the Cargo Hatch and I hope that causes it to drop its cargo

One thing with the flight assist off that was very cool.

You can point towards where you want to go. In between two asteroids, the entrance of a station etc...

Then you can turn your ship around to fire at someone etc... And you are guaranteed to stay on course. As long as you set up the right trajectory to begin with then you won't crash.