Comment by airblade
2 years ago
That’s very similar to my experience except docking was just too hard. No matter how carefully I tried to match the rotation, 99 times out of 100 I crashed. I still don’t really understand why! So I just stayed around the starting point, which was a shame but still quite fun.
Perhaps the Space Traders Flight Training Manual was to blame for the difficulty.
http://www.elitehomepage.org/manual.htm#A13
The manual was bundled with the cassette or disc, and it states in the 'Docking Procedure' section:
Approach the final moments of docking at DEAD SLOW SPEED
However this is dead wrong! If you put some speed on before entering the 'letterbox' you're actually far less likely to crash, unrealistic though this may be. It's perfectly possible to dock successfully at full speed. Try it out here:
https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=366
Oddly enough, the docking computers are also capable of crashing your ship.
And they still are, to this day in Elite Dangerous. Somethings never change.
The trick was to get perfectly perpendicular to the face of the spacestation that had the docking slot. But that was very hard to do visually. You had to fly directly away, turn around and watch the space station very carefully as it rotated to see if the rotation was symettrical from your point of view. Then approach slowly, match spin, but dont go too slow that actually made it harder. But even then would be game over one time in 20 or so.
Re:docking, if you went far away from the station, then kept it aligned in your crosshairs as you approached, you would be perpendicular to the front face of the station. Once I figured that out I could dock every time. I don’t think you needed to match the rotation of the station at all (at-least, not in BBC micro disk Elite).
That was probably it: not being quite perpendicular. Oh well!
Yes, I remember having pretty good success with this strategy.