Thats how the autopilot works now 🙂

If you select an enemy ship and you set your speed to 0 with the speed setting, then it will try to keep a relative speed of 0 which means it will try to follow it.

You can see this more if you accept an assassination mission and select the target before it leaves, set your speed to 0. When it takes off, you will see your ship follow it even though your set-speed is 0. Thats becasue it will be the relatve speed between the 2 objects.

You may have noticed that if you select a distant planet too quickly after having left a space-port, that you will crash into the ground as your ship begins to 'follow' the planet in question.

Ah ok. I need to forget my assumptions from previous Frontier experience then.

I didn't realise that you could get relative speed for a ship.

Thanks!!

No worries, you need a ship with strong thrusters to really notice it. Any of the small fighters will be more noticable.

anyway he's somewhat right, jousting style is the right word (more or less)

it depends on your ship of course what kind of fight it will be, i guess.

in the beginning i had exactly the same feeling and thought it's even more that way (jousting style) as frontier was.

one thing, i know FE2's physics are tuned to make battles "more interesting", they are not straight newtonian.

else enemies and yourself to could never reach a chosen ship in a reasonable timespan, this you will feel in pioneer, you can easely escape from all battles, even if your ship has lower specs as your attacker, lay a course accel. and set time accel to max....

bye, bye and they never get you.

unfortunatly you got the same problem if you like to reach another object that is moving, especially under speed control or autopilot, he simply can't follow (or estimate?) the curse of the enemy right, allways a little to late.

AI, Missiles, Speed Control and Autopilot, all lack to the same

strangewisely you never get faster as ~400m/s to your selected ship under speed control, i have no idea why.

if you follow a ship that is not in range of a few 100km, you never will reach it.

missiles act weird and as faster you set them the weirder they act, i really wonder where they point to, maybe next biggest mass, i can't tell, but when launched a missile, the fly i don't know wherer but not in direction of your enemy, or the need such a long time to turn that the target is long gone and the need another long turn...... (i guess the should "flip" direction when on a wrong course instead of starting a new curve)

you can see a similar behave when a ship like the Tie Fighter is used by AI, they can't reach you, as fast as this ship is (30g) they can't reach you! because reverse, directional, and lateral acceleration is low. no problem for a human pilot,

but (pioneers) AI can't handle it.

for humans "flipping", means don't fire main/rev thrusters on a turn, "flip" the ship and accelerate again, you can feel that you shorten distance much more to your target (a short curve) as when steady firing the thrusters (you will describe a long curve then).

with some experience you can get rid of the "jousting" and attack the target from top or bottom i.e. instead from front.

sometimes your'e also able to match the speed and keep the enemy close to you.

use rolls, that helps to shortcut your target but can completely mess up your direction in relativity to the target.

something annoying, a enemy ship once "deranged" won't stop hurling, even days later when you are able at all to reach after you let him go. if you ask me the should be on a straight course then, but they fly still in circles around in main velocity "tunnel". which i guess also confuses the speed control or autopilot, since that thing follows the mass of the target with no "intelligence".

further this could lead to complete wrong calculations and the autopilot will still accelerate even when you long passed the target, i guess some wrong mass reading, you can see by where the velocity cross is heading to.

something similar you can see on sling shots, the mass reading flips steadily even when the sun you are close to is allways selected.