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Section One: Basics and Getting Started
Part one:
Flight & Basic Ship Systems
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Welcome to your brand new ship! Regardless of how you acquired it, you should be aware that it has a throttle, which you can set with the Z (Accelerate) and X (Decelerate/reverse) keys. In order to turn it, you need to hold down the left mouse button while moving the cursor, and you can strafe it up, down, left and right using W/S/A/D.
Your ship most likely has a weapon or weapons - these may be fired using spacebar, and L or R keys on your keyboard. You can select a target in front of your ship simply by right clicking on it. You can request docking from a targetted station when you're very close (approx 5km) by pressing Shift-D. Docking requires you find and line up with your assigned docking bay - follow the green lines, then align yourself with the red and green docking hologram. Ensure that your roll axis is aligned, that your nose is pointing at the direct center of the hologram, and that you have moved to the precise center of the docking bay by using A/D to strafe left and right, and gentle use of the throttle back and forth - Z and X - until you are directly over the center. The use S to drop down. If you like, you can buy a docking computer software upgrade, which will assist by automatically landing your ship once you're close enough, with each grade of the software landing you from further away.
Platforms, or Spacelegs (Hanging out
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on stations. Crafting. Etc.)
Now that you've docked, it's time to stretch your legs! While you can perform many tasks from the comfort of your cockpit through the menu (enter), you can also step out and walk around with the WSAD keys. You can usually find a trader nearby, hiding under a shopping-cart shaped hologram, and you may be able to find an elevator to take you to various rooms within the station. It's a good idea to get to know traders, as you can often buy crafting materials from them. With some legwork, it's possible to gather the ingredients to valuable items, such as medkits, by buying individual needles, bandages, and sedatives in bulk from traders where you can. Selling these medkits on to other tracders is a great source of early income.
Section Two: The Interfaces
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