Baby, You Can Drive My Surface Recon Vehicle
08 Mar 2021Lhorndra
So, my very first geological field trip went swimmingly. The landing was quite difficult, though. Lots of ravines, gorges and canyons. Well, I suppose if you want to see something out of the ordinary, you have to try harder.(Actually, it wasn’t really that extraordinary, it was right in the middle of the very ordinary Veroandi system. But hey, It’s still special for me, having received my Commander’s licence just last month.)
On the surface of Veroandi AB 3 b, I had my first shot at driving my SRV. “Surface Recon Vehicle”? I mean, who comes up with those names? As I wrote in my previous entry, I was not too happy about the default button bindings in my Cobra. That’s true for the SRV controls as well.
I want to be able to control the SRV turret with my stick while still being able to steer, so I mapped steering to the RZ axis of my throttle and turret pitch/yaw to my stick. That works reasonably well, but I don’t know how it’s going to be in a tough fight. Driving in reverse is not optimal, though: holding the steering axis while pressing my reverse button is uncomfortable. Ah well, I can think about that some other day.
Everything else is very similar to my ship controls. I could’ve mapped all SRV functions to discrete buttons easily, but I wanted some consistency, so the modifier button appears again. At first, I mapped the turret mode onto the POV hat of my stick, which seemed the most logical position: weapons & targeting are there anyway. However, I decided to leave this POV hat blank. In contrast to my Cobra, there are no elaborate target selection functions in my SRV yet, but that may change with other SRV models in the future. So, forward compatibility for the win!
The Bindings Findings Series:
- Be in control of the ship controls
- What to do with all those buttons while sitting in a SRV (this entry right here)
- How to use scanners
- Gallivanting around the galaxy map
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Huge thanks to EdCardRef and GIMP.