Myrmidon: Leaving Home And Jumping in Elite Dangerous
Leaving Home and Jumping
You’re going to be itching to leave your home station and go exploring in The Black. After all, that’s what this game is all about! You can’t do that until you know how to take off though. That’s what this post is all: leaving home and jumping for the first time.
If you have an Advanced Docking Computer installed in your ship, it’s as easy as tapping the down button on your keyboard a couple of times until you get to ‘Auto-Launch’. That’ll take you out of the underground bay, lift you off from the dock and take you out of the station for a few Km. Leaving home and jumping couldn’t be easier. Or, get yourself a voice assistant from Voice Attack, and simply say, ‘launch when ready.’
Actually, when you think about it… Do you really think that in a thousand years time, they’ll allow pilots to land and take off on their own, when tens of thousands of lives depend on that pilot getting it right every time? I think not! The station will want total control when you’re in their airspace. So I reckon that’s more realistic than doing it yourself.
Leaving home and jumping manually is a different story and, once you feel confident, worth trying. You’ll need these skills for planetary landing (which I’ll cover in a later post), so it’s worth giving it a go – just not right now.
Do you really think that in a thousand years time, they’ll allow pilots to land and take off on their own, when tens of thousands of lives depend on that pilot getting it right every time?
This is what you do.
While you’re in the underground bay, hit your down arrow a couple of times to ‘Return To Surface’. This’ll take you to the dock. Then ‘r’ will lift you from the dock, ‘f’ will take you back down again, if you go a little too high. Retract your landing gear with the ‘l’ button. Hitting the ‘w’ key will the take you forwards, steering using ‘a’ and ‘d’, once you’ve raised your ship about 30metres. Head out of the letter box, waiting in a queue sometimes, and into the area controlled by the station. As you leave, make sure you’re on the side of the letterbox with the green light. You’ll meet oncoming traffic if you drive on the wrong side. Be careful though, those controls are twitchy.
You’ll be mass locked, where you can’t jump, for a while and you should stick to less than 100mps. Nothing will happen if you go too fast, but wobetide you if you crash into another ship while speeding.
As soon as you are out of mass lock, you can spool your frame shift drive (FSD) and jump by using the ‘j’ key. Simply find the vector on your compass sensor, to the top left of the centre console, and make sure it’s in front of you. A solid dot means it’s in front of you, a hollow dot means it’s behind you. Of course, you’ll need to have chosen a destination before you can do that. For that you use The Galaxy Map or The System Map. We’ll cover them in another post.
That’s it for leaving home and jumping for now. Let me know how your first time went in the comments.