Accelerating the supercruise assistant
06 Jan 2021Netchild
In the Robigo-bar I overheard a discussion about the supercruise assitant (SCA) being slow, and that you are faster doing it manually.I do not agree to this. Using it at its default settings is slow, yes. But just go to the ships right panel and change the SCA settings to manual thrust instead of automatic thrust. This way activating the SCA in the left panel for a destination will not accelerate the ship, you have to do it manually. If the speed is set to 75% (you better have a hotkey for it), it will behave as with the automatic setting. If you push to 100% or 50% speed, it will not change your direction.
This way you can use it initially to accurately point-in to the destination, accelerate to 100%, and then when you close-in to a 7 seconds distance push the hotkey for 75%-speed and it will slow you down as needed. If you want you can accelerate very shortly to 100% and switch back to 75% immediately (it shall not go below 6 seconds until arrival, else it will miss the target; you may have to repeat the 7->6 seconds speed-up several times, but pay attention to not go below 5 seconds). Once the target distance and speed indicator left of the radar starts to have the speed indicator below the fastest 3-4 speed-bars, accelerate again to 100% until there are only 5 seconds left until arrival, then go back to 75%. The time-until-arrival will continue to decrease from this point.
This way you will approach faster, the SCA will continue to steer, and the ship will still get out of supercruise at the destination (you may have to stop the ship yourself when you are out of supercruise, it may not trottle down automatically if you have it set this way in the ship-settings). If the destination is a nav-beacon or a tourist-beacon, you may overshoot a little bit and have to turn around.
In my experiance (which off course depends also on my flight-skills) this is faster than going fully manual and faster than going fully via the SCA.