Piloting Tips for Beginners

The following is a short list of tips for pilots that I wish had been here when I started. This page assumes you have made use of the in-game holo-trainer and have flown a mission or two.

Basics
1. Pilots in Jump to Lightspeed are categorized into Tiers. Tiers go from 1(lowest) to 5(highest). NPC ships are also rated in these same tiers. Keep this in mind when you're choosing targets to shoot at. You might think that a Z-95 (or a Scyk) is a weak ship because it's a starter ship, but a tier 5 NPC Z-95 will still soundly beat you down if you're only a tier 1 pilot. How do you know what tier pilot you are? Count the number of pilot trainers you've had. If you're on your first trainer, you're a tier 1. If you're on your second trainer, you're a tier 2, etc.

2. When using your hyperdrive menu to choose a sector to jump to, you can scroll down in the lower window to get an approximate distance to the planetary station in that area of space. This is useful if you're in say, Corellian space and you want to land on Tatooine. By scrolling down in the description of each of the Tatoo System's four sectors, you can find that the Desert Sands jump point is the closest to Tatooine Station.

3. When turning, make sure you roll into the turn. It allows you to turn much more tightly without having to slow down.

4. Your advancement in your pilot profession can be found in a separate tab on your Profession window. Here, near the top right corner of the window, is a horizontal red bar that measures your Starship Combat experience. It is grossly inaccurate, and will fill up long before you have actually gained enough experience to be trained. Mouse over it to get the numerical details of your experience.

5. Your ground Combat Level has no impact whatsoever on your pilot ability and vice versa. So, you can have a low-level master pilot or a level 90 piloting initiate. However, whenever you gain Starship Combat experience, you also gain ground Combat experience of about 10% of the Starship Combat experience you got, so if you're a low level, piloting can be a good way to gain experience in both areas simultaneously.

Combat
1. When you're chasing a targeted ship, and it is flying on a path perpendicular to yours (i.e. it is not flying towards or away from you), do not aim directly at the ship. Even if you appear to hit it, your shots will do no damage and you will waste capacitor energy. Hold your fire until you can bring your aim closer to the lead target reticle in front of the ship.

2. If you've seen the movies, you've heard the phrase "Accelerate to attack speed!" used once or twice in starfighting scenes. Don't do that. If you're like me, you typically fly from point A to B at full speed. The problem is that if you try to attack at full speed, you'll find that you will often be unable to turn fast enough to track your targets effectively, giving them more time to regenerate their shields, and more time for their buddies to attack you while you spin around. I've found that the optimal speed (remember, this will vary depending on your ship and your engines) for attacking is about 1/2 to 2/3 of your max speed, depending on how fast your target is and how close it is to you. So, the phrase should really be "Decelerate to attack speed."

3. If you've flown a few missions, you've probably had a missile or two fired at you. The warning is annoying, isn't it? I remember it made me think I desperately needed countermeasures of some kind to protect myself. The reality is that missiles fired from NPC vessels rarely do a large amount of damage. So, while annoying, missiles are hardly dangerous unless fired by groups all at once. They just hurt a little more than average laser attacks. Save your money, ship's mass, and power for more important components like shields, capacitors, and weapons.

4. When you gain access to level 2 droids/flight computers, get one immediately (most ships use flight computers - only a few use droids), and program it with 'Capacitor to Shield Shunt' and whatever other commands you wish. This single command is probably the most useful one available to pilots. As the name implies, it uses some energy from your weapons capacitor (amount of energy used depends on the level of the ability) and puts it into your shields, effectively regenerating an amount of shield energy instantly. Very useful if you're being shot at and your shields are down to about 1/4.

5. When firing at a target, don't just hold down the trigger and let your fire spray everywhere. Sure, you might hit your target, but you might also hit a neutral ship nearby, which will instantly make that ship hostile to you. Having this happen a few times can be deadly if you were already facing a group of hostiles - especially if the neutral ships you accidentally hit were of a higher Tier than you.

6. The match speed command only matches speed with your target at the moment you give the command. If your target changes speed, you will need to re-match. This makes the command rather useless altogether, except in a few rare circumstances.

7. When facing hostile ships with turrets, do not chase them, as the turrets will kill you quickly. Instead, try to make attack runs: fly toward the target, unleash everything you've got, then fly past your target (or turn around and boost away) and keep going until it stops shooting at you.

Component Management
I'm going to break the numbered list motif here because this section deserves more detail. The most important components in your ship are your main reactor, shields, weapons, capacitor, and engine (in that order, in my opinion). Ordnance and Countermeasures are rarely useful, and are probably the least important. The others, booster, front and rear armor, and droid interface are of medium importance. The cargo hold is only useful if you're going into asteroid mining, so don't even bother with it until you're a master pilot. All ships come with a predetermined maximum mass. This limits how much weight you can physically put into your ship, as each component has its own mass, and more powerful components usually weigh more than less powerful components. All components also have armor and hitpoint ratings, which determine how much damage they can take before they're disabled. Typically, I pay no attention to component armor and hitpoint ratings, as if you get to the point that your systems are taking damage, you're pretty much dead anyway. I'm going to give each component its own section and explanation.

Main Reactor
Without a main reactor, you don't have a ship, you have a hunk of metal parked somewhere. The reactor provides power for all ship systems. Virtually all components (except for armor) require power, so the more power your reactor can generate, the better. This needs to be balanced with mass, however. When you loot a main reactor that generates a little more power than your currently loaded reactor, look at how much it weighs. If it weighs alot more, it's usually not worth swapping out.

Shields
Your first line of defense. Never fly a ship without shields. Shields have five important criteria to look at: mass, reactor drain, front shield hitpoints, back shield hitpoints, and recharge rate. Obviously, the less mass and reactor drain, the better. Some shields will have different front and back hitpoint values, and in this case, the two values will be averaged when you load it into your ship. So, if you have a shield system with a front hitpoint of 500, and a back hitpoint of 1500, your ship will have shields of 1000 both front and back when the shields are loaded. Obviously, the higher the better. Equally important as your shield's hitpoints, however, is the recharge rate. The higher the rate, the faster your shields will regenerate. You'll need to carefully balance these four criteria when choosing which shield generator to load in your ship. For example, shields with alot of hitpoints but a very low recharge rate will protect you well from short bursts of damage, but if you're under a lot of fire for extended periods of time, you're going to be in trouble.

Weapons
Your first line of offense. Depending on the ship you have, you may have multiple weapon hardpoints to load. Keep in mind that more weapons aren't necessarily better because they all drain from the same capacitor (I'll get to that in a moment). Weapons have a ton of variables to look at, including mass, reactor drain, minimum damage, maximum damage, shield effectiveness, armor effectiveness, refire rate, and energy per shot. For min and max damage, obviously, the higher the better. The same goes for both effectiveness ratings, which measure how well a weapon works against shields or armor. Most weapons will have roughly equal effectivenesses (i.e. both will be around .500), but a few are specifically designed to work against shields or armor, and as such will have different effectivenesses (ion cannons, for example, work well against shields, and will usually have a shield effectiveness of .750 while an armor effectiveness of only .250). The point here is that if you only have one weapon hardpoint on your ship, don't load a weapon that specializes in shields or armor. Once you have a ship with two or more weapon hardpoints, feel free to experiment to your heart's content. As for refire rate, lower is better, since it's in decimal form. Finally, energy per shot is how much capacitor energy it takes to fire one shot of the weapon. Lower is better, obviously. Again, you'll need to balance all of these criteria when loading weapons. For example, having a weapon that does high damage with a fast refire rate doesn't do you much good if it costs you a lot of capacitor energy to fire - you'll quickly be out of capacitor energy, and that will really lower your damage per second rating. For the same reason, you may not want to load weapons in all the weapon hardpoints your ship has.

Capacitor
Your capacitor is practically as important as your weapons, since this is where they draw their energy. When your capacitor runs out of energy, your lasers won't fire, and you have to wait for the capacitor to recharge. And believe me, nothing is worse than being surrounded by 9 hostile ships, pulling your trigger and hearing an empty clicking sound. Well, almost nothing, anyway. Aside from mass and reactor drain, the capacitor has two important variables: maximum energy and recharge rate. Of these two, recharge rate is the most important, contrary to what you might think. A higher recharge rate will keep your weapons firing longer, though of course, a higher maximum energy is always nice too. For example, say you have a ship with three weapon hardpoints. Now, say you have a weapon that does high damage at a very low energy per shot rating, but that it weighs so much that you couldn't load any other weapons along with it. It may be worth it to use this weapon alone rather than to use three weaker weapons simply because you'll get more shots out of the heavier weapon.

Engine
It's what makes your ship go. Aside from mass and reactor drain, engines have four important variables: pitch speed, yaw speed, roll speed, and max speed. Usually max speed is higher, and pitch, yaw, and roll speeds are relatively close. Max speed obviously determines how fast your ship will fly in a straight line. Pitch, yaw, and roll speeds determine how quickly your ship can turn and roll. In all cases, higher is better.

Front and Rear Armor
Your second line of defense after your shields. If you've managed your primary components properly, these will rarely suffer damage, so much so that some pilots choose to fly without armor. Armor tends to be heavy, and typically provides little protection against equal competition - usually it only buys you a few more shots worth of protection for your systems. Still, there are a few situations, especially early in your career, when having armor comes in handy. You'll be fighting alot of groups, and groups like to stagger themselves so that everybody else can fire at your rear while you chase your target, so your rear armor should be stronger than your front armor, if you don't have two pieces of strong armor.

Boosters
Boosters give you a small, temporary boost of speed that is really only useful when trying to escape large ships. They're virtually useless in trying to escape fighters, as most NPC fighters at your level are quick and persistent enough that you won't get enough distance on them to force them to give up (NPCs 'usually' stop chasing you if you get 1000 m away from them). They're also usually equally useless in avoiding weapon fire, as NPCs have pretty good aim. Boosters have several variables, and they're pretty self-explanatory. I will mention, however, that the acceleration of your booster is pretty meaningless. Most boosters reach their top speed very quickly, so the half-second difference in acceleration doesn't matter.

Droid Interface
This handy piece of equipment allows you to make use of a droid or flight computer for the astromech commands mentioned earlier. Aside from the usual mass and reactor drain ratings, the only variable worth mentioning is droid command speed, which determines how quickly your droid/flight computer can execute a new command after a previous one. Counterintuitively, a lower command speed is faster than a higher one. Note that the actual droid/flight computer is loaded in a separate hardpoint from the interface.

Ordnance
Ordnance hardpoints allow you to load missile launchers. They're very similar to weapon hardpoints, except ordnance requires a lock on to a target and doesn't draw energy from the capacitor. In addition, missile launchers have to be loaded with the appropriate type of missile pack - a mark I proton launcher requires mark I proton missile packs (usually come in about 10 missiles per pack). A missile launcher can only be loaded with one missile pack at a time - Any missiles left in the launcher when you load a new pack will be lost. Worse yet, against equal or better opponents, missiles typically don't do enough damage to be worth it. The only exception I've found is when facing the Corellian Corvette for your master pilot mission, but since this page is for new pilots, we won't worry about that just yet.

Countermeasures
Countermeasure hardpoints work similar to ordnance hardpoints, but for countermeasure launchers/packs. As mentioned above, NPC missiles are low threat weapons that aren't used often, so this is the least useful system on your ship, especially considering that countermeasure packs are limited like missile packs, plus they aren't 100% effective.

Grinding for Experience and Credits
For most tiers, you'll need to gain Starship Combat experience to be allowed to train in a new skill box. This usually requires grinding. There is a separate guide for space grinding that mentions some places to go, so my tips here will focus on other areas not mentioned there.

1. Where you grind will depend on your tier and how well equipped your ship is. Your trainer will provide you with duty missions that will work well for grinding, provided that you can handle them without having to stop to repair. If you can't, ask around at stations for missions - the Yavin 4 Space Station and the Dathomir Space Station both offer good duty missions for grinding - plus, they offer additional missions which, when completed, will enable you to get full repairs at those stations instead of 75%. If you can't stomach duty missions, look around for appropriate hostile spawns.

2. While grinding, you will inevitably loot a large number of starship components, most of which are garbage. Rather than destroying these as they fill up your inventory, sell them to the Chassis Dealer (or put them on the marketplace) that you can find in most starports. As you grind, this will be your primary source of income which will enable you to buy better crafted components later on.

3. If you're grinding specifically for money, try to pick a level of difficulty that you feel is comfortable for you. Higher tier ships tend to drop higher level starship components but do so less often than lower tier ships, which drop lower quality starship components more frequently. So there's no point in going after the toughest ships you can find unless you're looking for components to put in your own ship, since it averages out to about the same amount of money either way.

4. After you reach master pilot, you can still gain ground experience by piloting (even though you no longer gain Starship Combat experience), so depending on your ground level, it may still be a viable way to level up.

POB (Party on Board) Ships
POB ships are ships that have interiors that can be walked around in. They're essentially moving houses that you don't have to pay maintenance on. All POB ships can carry multiple players, and all of them (except the Luxury Yacht, which is a vet reward, and can be piloted by anyone since it is a non-combat vessel) require a master pilot to pilot them, though anyone can be a gunner. If you're in a guild or have a network of friends that play often, a POB ship can be great fun. If you're thinking of becoming a master pilot so you can fly around alone in a POB ship, wreaking havoc on all hostile NPC ships, think again. The pilot of a POB ship is unable to fire weapons (if loaded, the pilot can fire missiles, however) or use astromech commands from the pilot chair, which makes them completely useless for solo grinding. Worse yet, if the pilot leaves the pilot's chair, the ship automatically stops, so if you're alone in a POB, you can either fly it or gun it, but not both simultaneously. The good news is that components specifically designed for POB ships are much more powerful than starfighter components, so for most encounters, you can just have your POB ship sit still while you man one of the guns, assuming that your attackers aren't too fast.