Wiki / Flight & autopilot
Flight & autopilot
Manual flight in Nova Protocol is fully Newtonian: momentum persists, nothing dampens you, and the only assist is the autopilot itself - which flies the same real controller and thrusters you do. There is no flight-assist toggle; how a ship handles falls out of its mass and the thrusters bolted to it. The one exception is RCS, an optional fine-translation mode a scenario can grant for close-in docking (see RCS below).
Manual flight
You point the hull by mouse or stick - the controller section turns the ship toward your aim - and hold W (or the burn trigger) for an analog main-drive burn. The main drive is the sum of the thrusters that point forward; inputs spool up and down smoothly rather than snapping. A ship can carry an optional soft speed cap (used by training legs like the Shakedown's 250 m/s starter governor - m/s is metres per second; see the glossary): the burn tapers to zero over the last stretch before the cap, along the burn axis only, so a held throttle levels off instead of accelerating forever. Turning and braking are never capped.
Balancing thrust through the hull
Because thrusters sit wherever you bolted them, an off-center burn would spin the ship. The flight computer prevents that: it sets each engine's throttle to deliver the commanded forward thrust while cancelling the twist through the live center of mass, recruiting off-axis thrusters purely for counter-torque when the firing set cannot balance itself. An asymmetric or battle-damaged ship still flies straight (any tiny leftover spin is mopped up by the steering) - see Thruster.
Size decides the handling
How hard a hull turns is the lower of two limits: what its flight computers twist it with against the mass they swing, and what its own metal survives. Hull takes 8 G, measured out at the furthest section from the centre of mass, so a long ship on a long arm has the gentler limit. Nothing authors the result - it falls out of the hull you built. A small craft whips around; a hauler handles like the freighter it is.
Every shipped craft is held by its structure rather than by its computers. Two things come with that: a hull that has lost its nose turns sharper than it did intact, because the arm got shorter, and a hull already deep in a hard turn has less authority left to tighten with.
A hull can mount several controllers and their torque adds, but on a structure-bound craft that buys no extra turn rate - only a hull heavy enough to run its computers out first gains from a stack. What stacking always buys is precision: the hull starts braking its turn earlier and stops on the commanded heading instead of swinging back.
The autopilot flies the hull
The autopilot verbs are the assist. Each writes to the same actuators you use - the controller's rotation command and the thrusters' throttle - so you watch the hull physically swing and the plume light up; there are no invisible forces. Any manual input (a thruster key, a burn, a rotation, or CANCEL) disengages it instantly and hands you back a ship that is already moving.
- GOTO - burns toward your current nav lock, flips at the arrival curve, and decelerates to rest at a standoff (about 500 m plus the target's radius, measured from the surface, kept outside a torpedo's blast radius). It tracks a drifting target.
- ORBIT - circularizes and station-keeps around the dominant gravity well, holding a stable ring at orbital speed (
v = sqrt(mu / r)) with micro-burns. It never self-completes - it holds until you break away. - STOP - flips to retrograde and burns until you are at rest, budgeting for the local gravity pull along your velocity.
Show explanation
What the scope calls the "arrival envelope" is the controller's one rule: at any distance it caps closing speed at what a flip-and-brake from here can still cancel. The flip is scheduled early by the time the swing itself takes - the shipped craft come around 180 degrees in about two seconds, a heavier hull takes longer, and whatever that coast costs is budgeted into the envelope, so the brake ramp starts aligned instead of late. Braking keeps a 15% authority margin in reserve, holds a small minimum approach speed so the last stretch never crawls, and hands the final meters to RCS: arrivals settle, they do not pulse the main drive on the spot.
The same machinery answers why the autopilot is honest about the ship's limits: everything above is computed from the live hull - its real mass, its real thrusters, its real flight computer. An under-thrustered build gets a shallower envelope and an earlier flip, not invisible help. And it will refuse a maneuver it cannot physically achieve: ORBIT disengages rather than fly a well with no stable band between its surface clearance and its fade band.
See Keybinds for the verb keys.
RCS: fine docking thrusters
For the last few meters of an approach - where a main-drive burn is too coarse - a ship can carry RCS (a reaction-control system): hold Shift and steer with the mouse (lateral and fore/aft) and the scroll wheel (up and down) to nudge the ship straight along its own axes, with no rotation. On a gamepad the same gesture is one thumb: click the left stick to engage, then push it to translate. While you hold it the helm and camera hold still so you can concentrate on the translation, the velocity sphere turns violet, and a soft burn loop plays.
RCS is a trim, not free thrust: each ship-local axis caps at a gentle speed (about 20 m/s), so it eases you into position rather than replacing the main drive.
Show explanation
The cap is per ship-local axis, relative to whatever the maneuver is holding as its reference: push an axis you are already coasting at the cap and nothing happens, while the opposite direction still slows you. The push is a single linear impulse through the center of mass, so RCS never rotates the hull, and the last 4 m/s before the cap taper off rather than hitting a wall. The autopilot uses the same thrusters under the hood - GOTO and STOP settle their arrival on RCS, braking with the fine jets in the last stretch so a ship eases to a stop instead of pulsing on the spot.
RCS is a controller verb granted per ship, like the autopilot verbs, and the mainline campaign flies with it withheld - the RCS chip only appears in the keybind dock when a scenario grants it, so you know when it is available.