How do you order a ship to go through a gate/accelerator?

[Browser_ice]

I can't find out how to order any owned ship to go through a gate or an accelerator.

How do we do this?

[radcapricorn]

Select ship, right click gate, Explore? At least, worked with a superhighway for me, not sure about other portals.

[MHDriver]

I usually just set a destination for it on the other side of the gate or accelerator. Before I explored all the sectors I would just click on the gate on the far side and select explore. You can r-click anywhere in a sector and select "fly to" if you want to keep from getting caught up in a hostile gate camp.

[Browser_ice]

It would have been interesting if they had created a "scout" command. That way it goes through the gate and if there is danger, it comes back.

[Scoob]

I wonder why we lost the basic "Fly through Gate" command that was part of the Navigation Software in prior games such as X3. A very simple solution.

Scoob.

[VincentTH]

I wonder why we lost the basic "Fly through Gate" command that was part of the Navigation Software in prior games such as X3. A very simple solution.

Scoob.

The equivalent of Fly-thru-gate is what radcapricorn wrote above: Select the ship, right click on the gate and hit Explore. It's the same command (Map ?) that existed in X3R

[Scoob]

The equivalent of Fly-thru-gate is what radcapricorn wrote above: Select the ship, right click on the gate and hit Explore. It's the same command (Map ?) that existed in X3R

Yes, I'm aware. What I was saying was that we appear to have lost a very obvious command - i.e. it was clear what it does - and gained a command that does nothing worthwhile for most ships. I've used "Explore" to send a ship through a get, then been distracted by another event, only to have said ship bumbling around in the new Sector doing nothing of use. Sure, the same ship just parked by the gate might be useless too, but Explore has the potential to send a ship into danger.

I think keeping basic commands clear and obvious is important for a good user interface.

Scoob.

[Ezarkal]

What I did the few times I wanted to send a ship through an unexplored gate is wait for an NPC ship to come by and ask my ship to follow it through the gate.

It was a pretty busy gate, though, so it worked fairly well.

[reanor]

The equivalent of Fly-thru-gate is what radcapricorn wrote above: Select the ship, right click on the gate and hit Explore. It's the same command (Map ?) that existed in X3R

Yes, I'm aware. What I was saying was that we appear to have lost a very obvious command - i.e. it was clear what it does - and gained a command that does nothing worthwhile for most ships. I've used "Explore" to send a ship through a get, then been distracted by another event, only to have said ship bumbling around in the new Sector doing nothing of use. Sure, the same ship just parked by the gate might be useless too, but Explore has the potential to send a ship into danger.

I think keeping basic commands clear and obvious is important for a good user interface.

Scoob.

The "Explore" doesn't make ship to bumble around, they actually do specific thing. Also, "Go through Gate" doesn't keep your ship safe in X3. In X4, all the ships have flee option. Whenever they receive specific damage amount, they will try to flee the combat. You can also adjust general options to flee the bandits, when they engage, but even without that, the damaged ship will try to escape the combat on it's own. Yes, it won't leave the sector. But then again, if you want to explore a sector, you first build a small scout ship. If you issue explore command on a gate, the scout will fly through the gate and will explore the system to discover stations. All you need to do, is to build a few scout ships and queue them to explore different sectors. It takes a bit of macromanagement, but that's what X games were always about, while you can automate majority of things and actions, you will need to babysit things.

I remember queuing up scouts to explore certain sectors as they opened and then on last order I would tell them to dock, they did the job wonderfully and docked. You can also set ships default behavior to dock. You don't need to 'forget' or be distracted, simply set ships default behavior after you build it to dock at specific station, and as soon as it stops doing your queued command, even if you get distracted, or forget about the game, the ships will turn around, exit any sector they are in, including the enemy sector, fly to specified station dock and wait for you like little puppies. And of course you want fast nimble ships to do exploration, they will escape combat much easier and do the exploration much faster, than a slower and bigger ship.

You can also the same way set those scout ships to drop the scanners. Load them with 15-20 scanners and queue up the route, drop scanner commands, then again, either with manual last order or the ships default behavior make them dock and wait. I've never had any problem exploring even some xenon sectors. Of course if enemy camps the gate, your scouts will have less time/chance to escape. So you may watch them, or send several scouts in, to increase their chances of survival.

[Scoob]

If my Captains are low level, they'll go through a gate and bumble around near the gate. They do generally eventually fly to the centre-ish of the sector since a prior update though. Doesn't change that weird sticking around the gate area behaviour though.

Talking flee behaviour, all my freighters are defaulted to this behaviour, yet they'll still often fly off to engage targets that aren't even threatening them - this occurs most often when there's been no order to drop cargo.

When I'm manually ordering ships around and through gates, I'm usually monitoring them quite closely if they're going to a new to known dangerous area. I to queue up LOTS of commands for my fast scouts (placing sats) and they generally do this issue free.

I recall the old X3 explorer software would send a ship through a gate, then immediately return and dock, before going through the gate again to actually explore. It seemed like a bit of a waste of time, but could help save the ship when it entered a hostile zone.

Scoob.

[Browser_ice]

I wonder why we lost the basic "Fly through Gate" command that was part of the Navigation Software in prior games such as X3. A very simple solution.

Scoob.

LOL, my bad. Was eating at the same time I was writting.