Combat Piloting

Scope: flying and fighting in a ship. For which weapons to bring and why, see Combat Damage Math. For on-foot combat, see The Ground Game. For Thargoids, see Thargoid and AX.

• Pips are the whole game. 4 to SYS when shot at. 4 to WEP when shooting. 4 to ENG to run.
• Keep your throttle in the blue. That is where your ship turns fastest. It is not the same as full speed.
• Control speed with thrusters and boost, not the throttle. Leave the throttle in the blue and steer with everything else.
• Reverski wins PvE fights. Throttle to zero, reverse thrust, keep the nose on target.
• Subtarget the power plant. It stops their shields coming back, and more hits can pop the ship outright.
• Learn in a cheap ship. A Viper Mk III teaches you more than a Corvette hides from you.
• High RES is the safest good hunting. Compromised Nav Beacons are the best combat rank grind.
• An NPC crew member halves your combat rank XP. Nobody tells you this.

Your power distributor splits 6 pips across three systems. Pip management is an essential skill. Know when energy is needed in shields and when it is safe or advantageous to divert it elsewhere.

• SYS feeds shield strength and recharge.
• WEP feeds weapon fire rate and recharge.
• ENG feeds speed, boost, and turn rate.

The habit to build: flipping pips without breaking your aim. That is the thing that separates a novice from an experienced commander. Pips do not just protect you. 4 pips to SYS roughly doubles your effective shield. It is the single biggest defensive lever you have, and it is free.

Your throttle gauge has a blue segment. Sitting inside it gives your ship its best turn rate.

• Full throttle is not best. It makes you fast and clumsy. A ship at full throttle loses to a ship in the blue almost every time.
• Turn rate is determined by your ENG pips and how close you are to the blue zone.

Do not use the throttle to control your speed in a fight. Park it in the blue and leave it there. Control your actual speed with:

• Boost to close or break away
• Reverse thrust to slow down
• Lateral and vertical thrusters to reposition
• Occasionally you will want to leave the blue, for example going full throttle to hold position on a boosting target. Know when to leave it and when to come back.

Flight Assist is on by default. It cancels your inertia so the ship handles like an aircraft. Turn it off and your ship keeps whatever motion it already has.

• The big one: it decouples your flight vector from where your nose is pointing. You can drift one direction while aiming another. That is what makes a pilot unpredictable.
• It also enables boom-and-zoom, where you turn and gain distance at the same time, so a bad pitch rate matters less.
• Without mastering FA-off, even something small like an Eagle can be troublesome to a sluggish ship armed only with gimballed weapons.
• A disagreement worth knowing: the wiki says FA-off allows sharper turns. Experienced players on the forums say turn rate is determined solely by ENG pips and blue-zone proximity, and that flight assist does not change it. Treat decoupling as the real benefit and any turn gain as unconfirmed.

• Do not fly FA-off permanently. Almost nobody does. Flick it off for a moment, make the maneuver, flick it back.
• A safe practice drill: find a weak NPC, shoot it a few times without killing it, then turn FA off and try to stay on it. Low stakes, real pressure.

The reverse thrust technique is one of the most useful maneuvers in the game. Throttle to zero, apply reverse thrust, and keep your nose on the target.

• Why it works: NPCs try to fly past you and come around. If you are reversing while facing them, they stay in your firing arc the whole time and you stay out of theirs.

When you and a target pass each other:

1. 1Boost to open the distance
2. 2When your speed drops back to the blue zone, hold FA off
3. 3Turn around and hold reverse thrust plus roll
4. 4You avoid more hits and hold a longer track on the target for gimbal lock

• Vertical thrusters make a substantial difference when trying to stay out of an enemy's frontal view while keeping your own weapons on target.
• Most players only ever pitch and yaw. Using the vertical axis is how you stop being a predictable target.

• Start from behind, at close range. Most targets immediately boost to turn around, so boost with them to stay on their tail.

Once you have fully scanned a ship, you can select individual modules. Most weapons automatically aim for the subtarget you select, which makes applying module damage easy once shields are down.

• Default play: power plant. It is the best combination of denial and kill potential.
• Runner problem? Drives or FSD first, then power plant.
• Bonus: a subtarget gives you a far more precise aim point than the target brackets. Useful for hitscan weapons at long range or in dark areas.

Mastering the Chaff Launcher, Shield Cell Bank, and Heat Sink Launcher can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Submitting is usually correct. Short cooldown, then 4 pips to ENG, boost, and high-wake out. Avoiding them entirely: carry no cargo and no missions and you will rarely be interdicted. Building reputation with the system's main faction also helps. Thargoid hyperdictions cannot be avoided. See Thargoid and AX.

• Fit an FSD Interdictor. Expanded Capture Arc is the usual experimental. Target a ship in supercruise, get close, and hold the interdiction.

Found in planet rings in populated systems. An unmarked RES is medium intensity.

• Look for systems with 3 or more RES near a station. 4 is very good. Restocking becomes trivial.
• RES intensity also boosts laser mining within 20 km of the navigation centre. See Mining.

Every populated system has a nav beacon at the main star. Some are Compromised.

• No police. Constant pirate spawns.
• Primarily high combat rank ships, which are still comparatively easy to take down.
• Possibly the best spot in the game for grinding combat rank.
• Normal nav beacons are not worth your time. They spawn mostly traders and police, the pirate quality is low, and proximity to the star cuts your sensor range.

• Conflict Zones: massive battles paying combat bonds, which are separate from bounties. High intensity zones need a strong combat ship. See Money Loops for stacking.
• Pirate Activity Detected: signal sources at Threat 4 to 8. High-value targets, often tied to wing missions.
• Where Not To Go: Anarchy systems. No police support, and you cannot identify wanted ships at all without a Kill Warrant Scanner.

Crimes in a Hazardous RES are not reported, but that does not make it an Anarchy system. Firing on a Clean ship still earns a fine and a wanted status with a 6 to 9 minute timer. If you then destroy that ship before leaving the instance, the fine becomes a murder charge and a bounty.

• Scanning first still matters, even where nobody is watching.

This is where most people waste months. Combat rank comes from ship kills. How much XP a kill is worth depends on the target's rank relative to yours.

• Read it backwards. A Harmless pilot killing an Elite ship gains a large number of points. A Deadly pilot killing something below Expert gains almost nothing.
• Under this system, low-ranked pilots climb fastest by destroying challenging opponents and accepting the risk.

Your rank down the side, target's rank across the top. M. Harmless = Mostly Harmless.

• Going from Deadly to Elite takes roughly 2,225 experience points. That is about 1,780 Elite kills, or roughly 2,400 kills at a more normal spread of ship ranks.

If you have crew members, including AI crew, combat experience is split evenly between them.

• One AI crew member roughly halves your XP and doubles the kills you need.
• If you are grinding combat rank, dismiss your NPC pilot. If you are grinding credits and enjoy the extra guns, keep them. Just know the trade.

• The Odyssey release removed the zeroing out of rank progression for killing an enemy several ranks below you. Older guides claiming low-rank kills are literally worthless are out of date. They are still nearly worthless, just not exactly zero.

Pick your current rank, your target rank, and the rank of the targets you hunt. The calculator applies the XP multiplier table from this module. Toggling NPC crew on halves your XP, roughly doubling the kills needed.

Losing is fine. Dying is expensive.

• 4 pips to ENG.
• Boost away from the attacker.
• Chaff or heat sink if they are using gimbals or missiles.
• High wake out (jump to another system) rather than supercruise. Supercruise can be interdicted again.
• If you must supercruise, point away from the star and boost first.

Take a small ship, such as a Viper Mk III or Imperial Courier, and practice combat before tackling larger targets. Why this matters: pilots who start in large ships tend to rely on shields and firepower alone to overwhelm a target, and never learn to avoid incoming damage. That is fatal later against well-armed foes.

• Gimballed weapons remove aiming fatigue and are the right starting choice. Move to fixed once your flying is good, because fixed weapons hit harder and ignore chaff.

• Full throttle is not fast, it is clumsy. Blue zone turns better.
• Do not steer with the throttle. Thrusters and boost control your speed.
• An NPC crew member halves your combat rank XP.
• Killing weak targets at high rank earns almost nothing.
• Do not fly FA-off all the time. Flick it for maneuvers.
• Do not pop chaff early. Wait until they are hitting you.
• Chaff does nothing against fixed weapons.
• Scan before you shoot, even in a Hazardous RES.
• You cannot see wanted ships in an Anarchy system without a KWS.
• Normal nav beacons are a waste of time. Look for Compromised.
• Destroying a power plant can instantly kill the ship with follow-up hits. Do not switch targets too early.
• Practice in a cheap hull. The lessons transfer. The rebuy does not.