Controls Panel

The controls panel specifies what kind of control is available for the ship and how it responds to those controls - its manueverability.

Active Controls

This is where you specify what controls are available. Turning one of these options on allows the screensaver to use that control for flight. A ship with nothing but forward thrust should have Pitch, Roll, Yaw and Forward Throttle turned on allowing it to fly in all directions with a forward speed. Any additional directional thrusts should be enabled with their respective option. Note that you don't have to enable Roll or Yaw or whatever. Capital ships might look funny rolling, but then again they may not. This *is* space, so technically there is no up or down.

Maximum Control Axis Deltas

Here you set the maximum amount how many degrees your ship can Pitch, Roll or Yaw per second. Think of this as the outer edge of a perfromance envelope or how tight the turning radius is. Keep in mind that the higher the number, the better chance your ship has of overshooting its target. High numbers often result in ships "bobbing" as they target. The throttle values are how much thrust a ship can apply to increase (and decrease) its speed per second. Again, high numbers can yield quick jumps forward and backward, sometimes so sudden that the ship kamakazes into its target.

Rate of Control Response

The control response rate is how fast the control surfaces respond to pilot input. The ship's pilot is flying the ship like a real pilot, with a joystick control. When the pilot pushes forward, for a pitch down maneuver, the ship pitches down with it's rate of pitch change increasing until it reaches the maximum pitch rate. No matter how hard the pilot continues to pitch the ship down, it will remain fixed at the maximum pitch rate. If the pilot suddenly pulls the stick back to pitch up, the pitch will have to come back to neutral before it can start pitching up.

Combining the maximum deltas and control response is very important for getting a ship to fly correctly. If a ship has high max deltas and low control repsonse, the ship will have a tight turn capability, but low responses - it'll take a while to get to the maximum turn radii. On the other hand, if the ship has low maximum deltas and high response rates, the ship can get to the maximum turning radii quickly, but have small turning radii. These are the extremes of each example, and you'll probably want to find a nice balance somewhere in the middle.