It stops your engines so you drift, nice for recharging afterburners without losign speed

Hit the cruise mode and press Z (or whatever you have bound for engine kill). You'll see... After you pressed Z, try to turn arround.

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Bazil, M. P.
Webmaster and founder of Roughnecks -Freelancer Division
"If you would care to follow me... " -- DEATH of the Discworld

When you kill your engine, you continue to go in the same direction but you can turn any way you want. Very useful as you can fly sideways at cruise speed while firing your weapons Note that your speed will slowly decreas and that if you want to fly normally you will have to turn your engines back on.

No one must've told DA that aerodynamics and 'air friction' doesn't have much place in space

Lol - that was the very first thing i thought when i played the demo - pity they had 2 do that really - if they could have had X's system it would have been cool - oh well - back to the demo i go ....

Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity

Enigne kill is the best way to run away from overly-powerful raiders. While you're cruising, if you hear an incoming missile, chances are that it's a cruise disruptor. Before the missile hits (anytime before) just hit engine kill and you'll maintain your cruising speed...and the raiders won't catch up to you.

There's a bug with engine kill as well. When you kill your engines, nearby enemies will stop persuing you -- for no reason at all. It doesn't matter if they're 50 M away, or 2.2K away. Try it out, it works. Read about it on the MP forum. Hopefully this will be patched soon.

Out,
Volstag

That's a GOOD thing!

Serious question: I'm having some difficulty getting the engine kill to work consistently. Sometimes it seems like I can hit 'z' while holding down 'tab' and the ship will drift properly. Othertimes it doesn't seem like it acknowledges the 'z' command at all. Is there some trick to getting it to work all the time with thrusters engaged?

There are several issues related to engine kill.

1. IMHO it's a best way to move in fights. I always fight using thruster only.
2. Yes, attackers do keep distance when you kill your engine AND turn around to them with all your 6+1 cannons ))
3. Engine Kill Does NOT work when you are in "Go To" mode (F2). Unexplainable. You can stop completely in this mode, even move backwards, but you can't turn off the engine.
4. Funniest bug of all. Ever heard of missiles that start target's engine? ))Cruise disruptor missile does exactly that when it hits you with your engine off. Happens all the time

Regarding the loss of speed issue, technically speaking a spacecraft flying through space would encounter varying amounts of interstellar dust. Admittedly not enough to bring a ship to a complete stop within minutes like in FL, but still... it's not a COMPLETE vacuum.

mook is right, forget about throttles. Turn off your engines and use the thrusters and you will be fighting at a faster speed.

This is also an effective way of using torpedos agains fighters. Just shoot the the shields off, race forward, flip and pump the thrusters once to gain positive speed and Torpedoes away!

Anyway i find noticed that the fighters do not seem try evading your torpedoes. It may be a hidden bug that fighters will attempt to evade missiles but not torpedoes.