Flight-assist off

I learned to fly with flight assist off in conflict zones, because all NPC ships in those fly without flight assist, and so you’re at a massive disadvantage with the limitations of flight assist - that’s not an exaggeration, the game literally makes you pitch, yaw, and roll more slowly with flight assist on by design.

The best way I can sum it up is:

I don’t know about you, but I very much prefer The Expanse physics, because it genuinely feels like how a spacecraft should in the absence of gravity or air resistance. Once you get used to that, going back to flight assist feels like something is wrong, as if your ship is broken or stuck in glue. I do everything with flight assist off now, including docking at starports - through the mail slot and everything, and yes I’ve done it in a Type-9 - and exploration as well. It might seem like a weird flex, but I genuinely feel it makes the game experience so much better, and everyone should try it.

It’s all a matter of retraining your muscle memory. Easier said than done, I know. Here are a few recommendations:

  1. Baby steps. Go out into the middle of empty space, park yourself at zero throttle with flight assist on, and toggle it off. Then gently start experimenting with pitch, yaw, and roll. Notice how every action requires an equal and opposite reaction to cancel out. Everything now has this sense of weight and inertia. Once you’ve internalized how this feels, you can start adding more complexity bit by bit, by trying it near an installation, above a planet/moon’s surface, and so on. Your own fleet carrier is a great place to start practising flight assist off landing.
  2. Use a large ship. This might sound counter-intuitive, but larger ships, though they have much more inertia and take longer to cancel out/reverse velocity, are much less disorienting. Smaller, lighter, and much more nimble ships can be very disorienting if you’re not used to flight assist off.