A newbie\'s outlook on IDS and Inertial Flight

ChazFox · Post by **ChazFox** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 2:46 pm

Alright, so I've had the full game for a couple days now, and I've been absolutely loving it. I've generally been mucking about, trading, cleaning solar arrays, mining and doing odd jobs here and there, and it's brilliant, I'm loving it.

Recently, though, I've been starting to get the hang of inertial flight using the keyboard, and I figured I'd discuss my thoughts here and see what experienced players and other newbies thought of Inertia and the Inertial Dampening System.

So! Until recently, I had been using the Inertial Dampening System fairly steady. It's a simple system, just point to where you want to go. Excellent for simple flight and making sure you stay on track. It's also pretty much a given requirement for planetary flight, as anyone who's accidentally tapped the space bar while in the atmosphere will tell you.

However, I've also been discovering the beauty, pleasure and practicality of turning off the IDS and letting inertia do its job, and there are two main plus points to this:

1) It's fuel efficient once you've got the hang of it. Moving about with the IDS on consumes fuel at a constant rate, depending on how powerful your engine is. With inertial flight, fuel is only consumed when you're adjusting your flight path or velocity.

2) It's a lot zippier. With even the cheapest engine on the cheapest frame, inertial flight will let you move forwards at speeds of well over 4000 MPS. This way, it takes less time to get out of a dense nebula field, or if you're like me and often screw up the coordinates when moving to a station, it lets you align yourself to the station's dock quicker. This goes in hand with the fuel efficiency listed above, making it very handy for moving from A to B within a sector while conserving fuel.

Now, I still use IDS from time to time, especially if I need to align myself to something quickly (Such as a Solar Panel array, or the gate that gets me the heck out of Olympus before anyone fires their missiles and blows me up), but for general trading purposes, inertial flight is king. The idea of hitting a button and letting yourself drift through space is also just incredibly fun for some reason.

Yeah, I have no idea why I posted this, but it's just something I needed to get out there in the open.

Loving the game so far, keep up the good work, StarWraith!

[Edited on 12-12-2009 by ChazFox]

ryuu · Post by **ryuu** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:48 pm

i use both pretty equaly, when i reach cruising speed with the ids the engines turn off, and when your doing manouvers below your cruising speed controll is easier with the ids, however when i'm fighting ships with the renegade frame+ i switch to inertial mode as most have much heavier weapons and enough missiles that you DON'T want to be in front of a target for more than a few seconds, and the incredible manouverability offered by my current build only really dcomes into it's own when the ids is off and i'm usning manouvering jets lots

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:27 pm

What you describe is exactly how you should be using your IDS. Use IDS for course adjustments and speed adjustments.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:58 pm

Wait, you can go faster than 4000MPS? :/

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 5:07 pm

Originally posted by Jeremy
Wait, you can go faster than 4000MPS? :/

Yes, but it will not register that faster speed on your display.
Your ship can only measure up to that limit.

Post by **Marvin** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 5:29 pm

Just don't get your keys confused ... especially when attacking capital ships. Nothing more annoying than thinking you're puking out flares ... only to find that you've been tapping on the space bar instead. That 4k speed advantage drops to zero really, really quick.

Wasp89 · Post by **Wasp89** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 8:21 pm

Inertial is wonderful, especially once you master horizontal and vertical strafing controls while flying in any direction (backwards, sideways, etc.) It allows you to pull some very tricky, tight maneuvers, and you can fly in such a way that you force your enemy to fight on your terms if he desires to engage you in close-quarters combat. I use IDS in combat to regulate speed, such as when I am trying to do a quick turn around (as when doing strafing runs on cap ships) or simply to keep my speed down so that my opponent has time to catch up to me as I fly backwards away from him--thereby bringing himself in range of my missiles/guns.

Dengar · Post by **Dengar** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 9:11 pm

Be aware that your cannons may not fire when you at max velocity. Bit of a bummer when you find that out as you zoom into the middle of a bunch of angry Reds!!!

BraveHart · Post by **BraveHart** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 4:05 am

Originally posted by Dengar
Be aware that your cannons may not fire when you at max velocity. Bit of a bummer when you find that out as you zoom into the middle of a bunch of angry Reds!!!

LOL....yup, nothing worse then out running your own weapons fire

-Darkhorse- · Post by **-Darkhorse-** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 4:26 am

Should try to jump backwards while at full velocity and firing and see if you can catch your own gun fire ! LOL

:P:P:P:P

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 4:31 am

Tried it but not sure if I got hit by my own or the enemies. ROFL

:P:P:P:P:P:P

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 4:53 am

Welcome to the board, Chazfox.

Here are a few things I should mention.

With fuel, the IDS does not really use more fuel if you're going in a straight line. It uses more fuel if you're turning because it's trying to re-vector your trajectory, but if you are going straight, the IDS will shut off the engines when you reach cruising speed.

Going faster, up to (and a little beyond) 4k means using the afterburners. This is not quite the same thing as inertial flight, though I always use afterburners when I'm using inertial. I turn on IDS mainly when I want to turn around and don't want to micromanage my thruster angle and such.

Do learn to use the strafe controls.

Also, you can do reverse afterburner. This is a very useful trick if you want to slow down to engagement speed after doing a fast close on an enemy.

Finally, for fuel conservation, this sounds weird, but you actually use less fuel by doing a micro-jump than by accelerating, with or without afterburner, to full speed. Try this out: go into your nav HUD, set coordinates to your current location, then jump. You'll instantly be going 4k+ and you'll have used maybe 1 unit of fuel. Now try stopping and accelerating to that speed using the afterburner and see how much fuel you're using.

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 7:15 am

Geeeeeeeez, Nigel, don't give all the tactics away. It can be used against you or me in a PvP. ROFL

:P:P:P:P:P

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 8:11 am

I don't play PVP, so as far as I'm concerned, we're all friends

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 6:12 pm

ROFL, You should try it thou PvP. You might enjoy it !

:P:P:P:P

Post by **Marvin** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 12:28 am

Originally posted by Nigel_Strange

I don't play PVP ....

Sometimes you don't have a choice. Unless, of course, you never log on to the B5 server.

ryuu · Post by **ryuu** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 9:58 pm

i would if i could

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 3:26 am

Why can't you ryuu?

Sinbad · Post by **Sinbad** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 10:50 am

Originally posted by Nigel_Strange
...so as far as I'm concerned, we're all friends

I'd like to see what happens when you say that to the Borg:D But it's nice to see an optimist!

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 5:13 pm

They will say "Friendlyness is Fertile..... !" LOL

:P:P:P:P:P

ryuu · Post by **ryuu** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 10:52 pm

my interweb connection is shall we say... terrible, i'm barely getting fast enough to play WoW during off peak hours

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 2:28 am

Originally posted by ryuu
my interweb connection is shall we say... terrible, i'm barely getting fast enough to play WoW during off peak hours

Are you using regular Modem via phone line, DSL, or Cable and/or Wireless ?

warsign · Post by **warsign** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 1:54 pm

Wi-fi is such a terrible connection type. Didn't work well for PC gaming...

ryuu · Post by **ryuu** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 8:41 pm

DSL, with orange, we where with wanaddo and when orange bought them out we changed with it, and it's stedilly got worse, we need to change it, but this is the cheapest one we can find atm, as it is included really cheap along with my mum's mobile phone contract...
oh and i have both wifi and ethernet connections, as if one goes down (say my mum knocks the ethernet out or there is wifi interferance) the other semlessly picks up the connection...

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 8:49 pm

Ah, that explains why. Sorry to hear. Hope they bring cable soon to your area or maybe it is already there but to expensive for you ?;)