Wiki / Your first flight

Your first flight

Nova Protocol is a build-and-fly space shooter. You take a modular ship into a scenario with asteroids, salvage, hostile ships, and planets that provide static gravity wells. 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, Basic Training beat by beat, and where to go next.

Launch and start

The game boots into a main menu. On a first launch a card in the bottom-left corner offers you Basic Training straight away, with Open lessons beside it and Not now to put the card away for good. Start Basic Training puts you on the Fleet gunnery range in a ready-made armed trainer, so there is nothing to build first. The other doors can wait.

The card is a one-time offer, not the entrance: the menu's Lessons row always opens the handbook, whose first row is Basic Training, and Settings > Interface > Training prompt switches the corner back on if you want it.

Under it sits a field note - one short fact taken from the handbook, with Open lesson to read the page it came from and Don't show again to stop the notes appearing on the menu. It changes each time you come back to the menu, and the same notes fill the slot at the bottom of every loading screen, which that switch does not touch. While a practice range loads, the note is about what that range teaches. Settings > Interface > Field notes switches the menu card back on.

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

For your first flight, pick Start Basic Training on the card, the Basic Training row at the top of Lessons, or Basic Training in Scenarios. It 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 as soon as the range sees the gesture done.

The first two minutes

Distances read in meters and kilometers and speeds in meters 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. Z, a burn on W or G again hands the ship straight back to you; the mouse does not, because while the computer flies your look input only swings the camera.
• 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. Basic Training covers all of it on an armed trainer, ORBIT included.

Basic Training, beat by beat

You open on the Fleet gunnery range in an exterior shot of Trainer Seven, an armed picket held on the line, while Range Control reads the qualification card: fly the pattern, take the flight computer out to the planetoid and back, put five target hulks on the scrap list, then deal with two live drones. The camera comes back with the helm, each objective arrives as a short amber notification, and one gold marker at a time keeps the current target in view.

Part 1 - The pattern

1. Burn to mark ALPHA. Hold W to burn and steer with the mouse. ALPHA sits dead ahead; flying into its ring completes the beat.
2. Kill the drift. Press X once and let STOP brake the trainer down. Hands off the throttle: the next lesson waits for the maneuver to finish, and a burn or Z takes the ship back before it is done. The mouse is safe - it only moves the camera while STOP flies.
3. Slide across to BRAVO. Hold Shift and move the mouse to translate without turning the hull - short taps, not a held push. The velocity ball on your HUD goes violet while the thrusters have the ship, and ten violet pips under the speed chip show how much RCS is left. Let go and they refill.

Part 2 - The flight computer

4. Travel-lock the planetoid. Keep weapons down, put the planetoid off the far corner in front of you and hold Ctrl until the white travel lock takes. A red lock means weapons were up: it is the gun's lock, and the computer flies only the white one.
5. GOTO. Press G and the autopilot flies the leg: it burns over, flips, and stops 500 m off the rock. Hands off until it is parked; a manual input takes the ship back, and the card waits for you to lock and press G again.
6. ORBIT. Parked inside the planetoid's pull, press O. The computer circularises and holds the orbit; the beat completes when it calls the orbit stable.
7. Home to CHARLIE. Mark CHARLIE goes up on the line. Travel-lock it - wait for it to come round if the planetoid is in the way - and press G. The computer drops the orbit on its own. Flying home by hand counts too: CHARLIE's ring closes the beat.

Part 3 - The line

8. Lock Target 1. Hold the right mouse button to raise weapons, put Target 1 in front of you and hold Ctrl until the red combat lock takes. A white lock means you swept with weapons lowered: it is a travel lock, it feeds no gun, and Range Control asks you to sweep again.
9. Put rounds into it. Hold the left mouse button and the gun follows the lock. Keep the rounds on the hulk until it comes apart. A cadet who shoots Target 1 apart before the lock lands skips the lesson; the card moves on either way.
10. Clear the line. Four more hulks are marked. Work them in any order; the range tallies each one as it breaks up.

Part 4 - Something that shoots back

11. Two range drones go live. They sat neutral through the whole card. Now they turn hostile, come for you, and shoot back. Defeat both - destroyed or disarmed, either counts. A crippled drone that coasts off the range counts too: Range Control calls the recovery tug, and you are not asked to chase it.
12. Range is cold. Range Control logs the qualification, welcomes you to the Fleet, and points you at the Scenarios board for your first posting. Breaking the trainer up, or losing its gun, ends the card with a Retry on the same range.

(Tap Ctrl to clear a lock at any time.)

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.

Mining and cargo

The line warship New Game gives you carries a docking port on each shoulder, a cargo intake on its top deck and a mining beam at its bow. Its hold is what keeps it fighting: a repair spends hull plates, and every idle reload spends ammunition. Press Tab and step to the Inventory pane to see what you carry.

1. Take from a wreck. Each generated derelict wreck carries its own mixed goods - it may hold no hull plates at all - and a share of its credits. Travel-lock one, line one of your ports up with one of its ports and press D to dock. In the Inventory pane, click an item and Confirm to take it, or click Take credits to take its whole balance in one click. D again lets go.
2. Mine a rock. Travel-lock a rock, put your nose on it inside 100 m and hold V. The mining beam cuts it once a second, and the ore drifts off the rock in canisters.
3. Pick up a canister. Fly your top-deck cargo intake up onto a canister, door first. It goes into your hold whole.
4. Drop cargo. Undocked, click an item in the Inventory pane and Confirm a Jettison. Close the pane and the intake drops it as canisters, which you can pick up again.

Ore sells to a docked ship that trades: a living generated ship carries its own goods and credits, so Buy and Sell work once you dock with a calm one you have not neutralized. Mined ore stays in your hold until you find one.

Where to go next

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

• Flight & autopilot - how ships move and what GOTO, ORBIT and STOP each do.
• Gravity wells - how static wells on planets and anchors affect mobile asteroids, ships, rounds, and torpedoes.
• Ships & damage - what a hull is made of and how it comes apart.
• Targeting & radar - deliberate locking, stances, and per-section fine-lock.
• Combat - the engagement ladder and the rules every weapon shares.
• Ship sections - what each part of a ship does, one page per part.
• Keybinds - the complete control reference for keyboard and gamepad.
• Glossary - the recurring terms and units in one place.

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