Wiki / Your first flight

Your first flight

Nova Protocol is a build-and-fly space shooter. You take a modular ship into a scenario - an asteroid field with gravity wells, salvage, and hostile ships. Everything moves under real Newtonian physics - momentum persists and nothing dampens you, so you fly the ship, not a cursor. The flight computer can fly for you through real thrusters, but a manual burn or RCS input hands control back to you. This page is the whole first flight: how to launch, the core gestures, the Shakedown Run beat by beat, and where to go next.

Launch and start

The game boots into a main menu. New Game drops you into the Shakedown Run - a guided tutorial scenario with a ready-made ship, so there is nothing to build first. The other doors can wait.

In any scenario, Esc pauses the game and gives you Resume / Retry (restart the current scenario) / Settings / Back to Main Menu / Exit.

Pick New Game. The Shakedown Run teaches one gesture at a time and hands you each verb only when you reach the beat that needs it - so a key that answers with a deny buzz early on just is not unlocked yet. Each beat completes the instant the gesture lands.

The first two minutes

Distances read in metres and kilometres and speeds in metres per second (m/s); see the glossary.

• Burn. Hold W (or Space) for the main-drive burn and aim with the mouse. You point the hull, then thrust where the nose looks. The velocity sphere beside your ship shows where you are actually going.
• Lock a target. Hold Ctrl to sweep the radar; the hollow box shows what you are about to lock. Settle on it and hold steady for a moment - a short lock-on dwell has to fill (longer the farther the target is) before the lock latches, and sweeping off before then cancels it. A white crosshair is a travel (nav) lock; raise weapons first (see below) and it lands as a red combat lock instead.
• GOTO. With a lock, tap G and the autopilot flies you there - it burns over, flips, and coasts to a stop just off the target. Any manual input hands the ship straight back to you.
• Raise weapons and fire. Hold the right mouse button to raise weapons (combat stance); your reticle goes red and the ship is now "hot". Left mouse fires the turrets and launches torpedoes. A torpedo only launches while you hold a red combat lock.

That is the whole core loop: burn, lock, GOTO, shoot. The Shakedown Run walks you through each beat in order.

The Shakedown Run, beat by beat

You open drifting off the dock while Capt. Halloran briefs you through the comms stack - the run's first conversation, and the campaign's first look at your own voice. Her lines carry the story; each objective arrives as a short amber notification, while gold markers keep the current target in view. She keeps talking you through the run, with each line followed by breathing room before the next objective.

Part 1 - Burn and look

1. Burn to Beacon 1. Hold W to burn, tap X to STOP. There is a gentle speed cap here that lifts once you arrive.
2. Find Beacon 2. It is off your beam. Hold Alt to free-look around and spot it, then burn over.
3. Recover 3 supply crates from the debris cluster - fly through each one to collect it.

Part 2 - Lock and let the computer fly

4. Lock Beacon 3. Your targeting computer comes online. Hold Ctrl on the beacon until the white NAV lock sticks. Radar locking is deliberate now: holding Ctrl sweeps and live-locks whatever your look ray is on.
5. Press GOTO. With the beacon locked, press G and let the computer fly you there.
6. On to Beacon 4. A new waypoint appears - lock it and press G again.

Part 3 - Gravity and orbit

7. Coast. You drift into the planetoid's pull - cut the burn and let gravity carry you.
8. Press ORBIT. Press O and the ship parks itself into a clean orbit around the well.
9. Break away. Press Z to cancel the autopilot and burn clear.

Part 4 - First blood

10. Paint the derelict hulk. Hold the right mouse button to raise your weapons, keep Ctrl on the hulk, and watch the corner viewfinder. Raised weapons make the radar commit to a red combat lock instead of the white nav one.
11. Open fire. Locked on, fire the turrets with the left mouse button.
12. Drive off the scavenger. Destroying the hulk draws a scavenger picking through your debris field - put it down.

Finish that and the Shakedown is complete: the victory screen offers to continue straight into Broadside, chapter two - a hauler's distress call, an ambush, and the gang's torpedo gunship. (Tap Ctrl to clear the combat lock; tap it again to clear the nav lock.)

The sandbox

Sandbox opens the ship editor. Build a hull, press Play, and you launch into a free-flight range with nothing to win and nothing to lose but the ship:

• Rock belts: a shallow one off to starboard, and a deeper wall of bigger rocks straight ahead.
• Target hulks off to port - inert bare-hull wrecks that never shoot back. Practice fire.
• Pickets further out. They sit neutral and ignore you until you paint one with a combat lock or fly too close, and then they fight. There is no way to un-wake one.
• Beacons that swap the sky as you pass through them - one out, one back.
• A planetoid off to port with a real gravity well. It is far enough that you have to go looking for it.

Nothing here ends. The objective on your HUD just names the way out: F1 returns to the editor at any time, and if you die the overlay offers Retry on the same range with the same ship.

Where to go next

That is everything you need to get off the launch pad. The rest of the wiki is the full reference:

• Keybinds - the complete control reference for keyboard and gamepad.
• Flight & autopilot - how ships move and what GOTO, ORBIT and STOP each do.
• Targeting & radar - deliberate locking, stances, and per-section fine-lock.
• Ship sections - what each part of a ship does.
• Glossary - the recurring terms and units in one place.

Launch the game