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COVER STORY

Flight assist: some of us turn it off
a little, some of us turn it off a lot.

Few of us leave it off for good. In this
issue, we get to know a particularly

ambitious group of pilots and speed
junkies.

ith flight assist (FA), a pilot flies their vessel in a
manner not unlike an aeroplane in a standard at-
Wmosphere. FA off allows a pilot to decouple their
velocity vector from the direction they are facing, with-
out the flight computer automatically opposing each in-
put when it’s released.

The result is unnerving to the uninitiated. What used to
be a vessel with a predictable flight behaviour is now an
untamed beast trying to throw its rider.

Enter Newton’s Gambit
Space-mad and borderline suicidal. Endlessly joyous
and cheerful.

Comprised of commanders hailing from all walks of life
and founded some time in 3303, Newton’s Gambit is a
group with only one common core principle: they are ab-
solutely, unequivocally, addicted to keeping flight assist
turned off. They argue that, as with most things in life,
more is better; and when it comes to controlling a ship in
the depths of space they might have a point. As it turns
out, keeping FA off is actually a gateway to some other-
wise inaccessible piloting abilities.

Boosts that accelerate ships in unintuitive directions;
turns tighter than anything that should be possible; flight
paths that seem to upend the laws of physics. To the
commanders of Newton’s Gambit, this mockery of the
traditional movement of spaceships is simply another
Tuesday morning. To find out more about how they oper-
ate, your correspondent enlisted.

Shortly after pledging, the training session began un-
der the supervision of Gambit veteran, Commander
Sanderling.

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