Flight Modes on a Single Lever
How advanced ships pack manual flight, hover and auto-landing onto one control — with a worked example from a 597-subscriber ship.
Sourced from ship authors on the Steam Workshop
A cockpit has room for a handful of levers, and an interplanetary ship needs far more than a handful of behaviours. The way advanced builders solve this is to put several flight modes on one lever and let its position decide which circuit is in charge. Below is a real, working example, taken from the most-subscribed ship in this library.
One lever, three modes
The pattern is to split a single lever's 0–100 travel into bands. On the ship in question the author documents it exactly:
| Lever position | Mode |
|---|---|
| 0–33 | Manual controls |
| 33–66 | Hover mode |
| 67–100 | Horizontal auto-land |
Why this works better than three separate switches: the modes are mutually exclusive by construction. A lever cannot be in two bands at once, so you can never have the hover circuit and the landing circuit both driving the same thrusters.
Hover mode: two ways to set a target
In hover mode the up/down lever stops being a throttle and becomes something less obvious. In the author's words, it "works as a count up and down for target altitude" — it changes the target rather than setting it. Which leads to the trap:
Return the lever to zero once you reach your target. Leave it off-centre and "the number will keep counting" — the ship will keep climbing or descending forever.
The faster alternative is a dedicated button. On this ship a LOCK ALT button "will set your current altitude as target" — fly to where you want to sit, press it, done. Worth copying: it turns a fiddly two-handed operation into one press.
One display detail from the same author: current altitude shows by default, but to see the target altitude you switch the wireless channel to 7. Radio channels are how these ships move readings around without running cable across the hull — one transmitter, several receivers listening in.
Auto-landing takes your controls away
In auto-landing mode the ship lands on its bottom thrusters, and during that time the up/down lever does nothing — "the auto landing circuit is controlling it now."
That is the correct design, not a limitation. Two controllers fighting over the same thrusters is how ships end up oscillating into the ground. If you build your own, make the automatic mode take exclusive control rather than adding to whatever the pilot is doing.
Entry burn: the interplanetary bit
Arriving at a planet is a separate problem from landing on it, and this ship gives it its own switch. The procedure the author describes:
- Travel out past the midpoint of the trip.
- Flip the ship so its back faces the planet you are heading to.
- Turn ENTRY BURN on. It "will perfectly slow you down to safely enter the planet's atmosphere."
- Once inside the atmosphere, turn it off.
- Now switch to auto-land and come down horizontally.
Entry burn and landing must not overlap. The author is emphatic: the entry burn switch "should be off" when you are landing on your bottom thrusters. Main engines firing during a descent on lift thrusters is exactly the conflict the mode lever exists to prevent.
What to take from this
- Bands on one lever beat several switches — modes become exclusive by construction.
- Give the pilot a "lock what I have now" button instead of only an incremental control.
- Automatic modes take control, they do not share it.
- Move readings by radio channel rather than cabling across the hull.
- Label the conflicts. A ship with modes needs the pilot to know which switch must be off.
And the honest note the author makes about their own build: it has so many systems that they asked a friend to work out how to fly it, and filmed the result. If your ship needs a manual, write one — nobody else can reverse-engineer your wiring from the cockpit.