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).

Screenshot assets/wiki-flight.png A ship braking under GOTO: flipped retrograde with its drive bells turned toward the lens, the AP GOTO - BURN chip and the closing speed beside it, and the predicted path running ahead of the ship.

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. Nothing caps your speed: a burn adds to the velocity you already carry, a held throttle keeps building it, and letting go keeps whatever you built rather than bleeding it back off. Turning the nose aims the next burn and nothing else - your velocity does not follow the hull around. Speed only comes off the way it went on, by burning against it: swing retrograde and burn, or press STOP and let the flight computer fly the braking for you. GOTO plans its own flight independently.

Chase camera zoom

In normal flight and in Alt free look, the scroll wheel zooms the chase camera. Wheel up moves the camera closer. Wheel down moves it farther. The closest view is the ordinary framing. The farthest view sits several times farther back. The camera dollies along its arm; the field of view does not change.

Normal flight and free look share one zoom level, and free look stays farther out than normal flight. The level lasts for the game session, so a mode switch or a respawn keeps it. It is not saved, and the HUD does not show it. A planned ORBIT opens at its own survey distance. The wheel adjusts from there, and it cannot go closer than the ordinary framing. Leaving ORBIT restores your earlier level.

A main-drive burn eases the camera back by a fixed share of its distance from the moment it starts, whether you or the autopilot fly it. A short tap leans it only slightly. The camera holds its lean through gaps in the burn, so braking pulses do not flicker it. Half a second without the burn eases it home.

With weapons raised (hold the right mouse button) the wheel does not zoom. It steps the component fine-lock instead, and the combat camera stays as it is. While you hold Shift for RCS, the wheel drives vertical thrust. The gamepad has no zoom gesture.

The hull decides the handling

Nothing about handling is authored; it falls out of the hull you built. A section weighs the box it is hit on, so a ship's mass is its shape. The main drive is whatever thrusters point forward, balanced through the live centre of mass so an asymmetric or battle-damaged layout still flies straight. And how hard the hull turns is the lower of two limits - what its flight computers can twist against the mass they swing, and what its own metal survives at 8 G out at the furthest section - so a small craft whips around, a hauler handles like the freighter it is, and a wreck that has lost its nose turns sharper than the whole ship did. The Thruster and Controller pages put scopes and numbers on both halves.

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. Five things hand the ship back, instantly and already moving: CANCEL, a main-drive burn, a bound thruster key, entering RCS, and pressing the engaged verb again - plus, for GOTO alone, clearing the travel lock it is flying to. Moving the mouse is NOT one of them. While a maneuver is engaged the computer owns the rotation command and your look input drives the camera only, so a hull that will not answer the mouse has not stuck: it is still flying the verb.

GOTO - burns toward your current nav lock, flips at the arrival curve, and decelerates to rest a standoff off the target's SURFACE (about 500 m, kept outside a torpedo's blast radius). The gap is measured from your own hull, not from its centre, so a hauler and a shuttle both stop the same distance clear - and it counts whatever size the target publishes: a rock's geometry, a planetoid's body, a beacon's orb, another ship's hull. A bare position has no size, so the leg simply parks your hull face 500 m off the mark. 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 your speed off, budgeting for the local gravity pull along your velocity. "At rest" is a deadband and not a dead stop: a residual the drive is already pointing at is braked out to 2 m/s (m/s is meters per second; see the glossary), and one it is not - a sideways drift, or a head-on crumb - is handed back at up to 7.5 m/s instead of being chased with attitude flips, so a hull already drifting slower than that is released without turning at all. A ship carrying RCS settles the remainder on its jets.

While GOTO or STOP flies, the HUD draws the predicted path up to 30 seconds ahead, and GOTO a dim straight guide on to the target. The path forecasts the flight; the guide only points at the target. Neither plans a route around anything.

One GOTO leg by the numbers: the drive burns out while the arrival envelope allows, swings retrograde one flip early (the envelope budgets the coast the flip costs), brakes at 85% of what the drive can do down to a 15 m/s approach floor, and eases the last stretch onto the 500 m standoff with the fine RCS jets. The scope flies the base Patrol Gunship, so the resolved distance counts its own 55.2 m arm - balance point to the outer face of its furthest section, not the 85 m the hull is long - as well as the body's. A longer leg just means a higher peak speed - the flip always lands the braking ramp on the standoff.

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 light hulls come around 180 degrees in about three seconds, heavier hulls take 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.

Loop capture assets/loops/goto-arrival.webm A short loop of a GOTO arrival: the flip to retrograde, the braking burn, and the ship easing to rest at the standoff on RCS.

The whole verb is visible on the hull: flip, brake, settle.

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 controlled translation rather than a main-engine burn: it accelerates at a mass-independent 5 g at any speed, so it can match a fast target, but it runs on a magazine of 300 m/s of velocity change. Ten violet pips under the speed chip show what is left. Let go for 2 seconds and it refills at 100 m/s every second. Diagonal input shares one acceleration budget rather than multiplying it across axes.

Show explanation

Every push draws from the magazine by the velocity change it actually delivers, in any direction, braking included. An empty magazine pushes nothing, and holding the input on an empty magazine keeps it empty: the refill starts only once you let go. The push is a single linear impulse through the center of mass, so RCS never rotates the hull. The autopilot uses the same thrusters and the same magazine - GOTO settles its arrival on RCS, and STOP brakes entirely on RCS without turning the ship whenever it is moving below 100 m/s. Faster stops, or an empty magazine, still turn the main drive into the braking direction. The main drive never draws from the magazine.

RCS is a capability granted per ship, like the autopilot verbs, and a scenario may withhold it: Basic Training starts without it and hands it over at the beat that teaches it, while Season 1's first chapter flies on it from the opening. The RCS chip only appears in the keybind dock when a scenario grants it, so you know when it is available.