Bread n Butter Interceptor Maneuvers

AB to max speed
Push mouse vertically to Pitch Up
Hold down Q or E
You can tune the size of your spiral by varying your pitch angle
The smaller the spiral the faster your linear speed ie you get to where you want to run to faster
The larger the spiral the harder you are to hit albeit slower linear speed




AB to max speed
Q or E to bank 45 degrees
Pull your mouse in that direction to 'slide' across
Flick your mouse in the opposite direction then Q or E in tandem

The key here is to flick the mouse and invert your roll direction at just the right moment to cause an abrupt momentum shift
In the video you can see I timed my first run wrong but got it (somewhat) right towards the end of the second run
If you can chain this 'momentum flick' going from one direction to the next it makes you impossible to hit
Good players can track Helix even if you vary the spiral size
Good jinks are impossible to hit

Noob inty pilots will just Yaw left and right with their mouse.
This is useless because the prediction marker movement is still smooth and predictable
Mediocre inty pilots pulse acceleration (ABs) in conjunction with yawing left and right. This helps but:
1. their linear speed is slower than jinking
2. prediction marker although harder to hit is not erratic enough to make hitting them with lazers impossible

Prediction marker on good jinks will flicker left and right so fast even hitscan cannot track




Everyone knows Orbiting
A couple quick points
1. There is a slow orbit and a fast one, slow tends to get both turrets on target easily. The fast orbit usually will only have 1 turret shooting
2. Against good Frigates you will want to alter your orbiting angle every 2 seconds or so before they can adjust their aim on you
- you can either strafe down/up to change this angle or roll Q/E for half a second while orbiting




The 180 is so basic to flight games that no one ever does them anymore. Nor do they expect to see one.
You'd be surprised how many inty (even fighter) pilots will overshoot you when you do a 180

More than a combat maneuver, the 180 actual creates structure to how I fly my fighters / interceptor.
Map is often divided into two, the enemy side and our side
Whenever I'm in their side and need to bug out, I know a 180 will point me back to base.

You need to build muscle memory to execute accurate 180s consistently under pressure
Ships move so fast you can end up doing 360s or more without realizing it
How many times have you tried to retreat mid dogfight but end up flying towards the enemy spawn instead ?

Finally, 180 can chain into Helix and Jinks very organically in this game.
You can fly underneath someone and 180 to pop up behind them jinking your way into range then Helix out etc.

This is one of the guys who coached me when I flew for NASA

Note how he doesn't over-use Helix and Jinks but rather string them in short maneuvers one into the next.

Also good pilots setup their attack angles trying to aim with Q & E as much as possible, keeping their cursor in the forward cone (top center of your screen)

They YAW with the mouse laterally only when targets overshoots past them and they need to react to it quickly. Once they're able to they will re-aim with Q&E again.

He has a peculiar 180
Since he's using high sensitivity he can flick his mouse behind him and as the ship hull turns to follow the mouse he would AB + Srafe + Roll which results in a very fast 180 mini helix. You kinda have to 'feel' for it, working with the ship's inertia to pull it off. I use low sensitivity so I can't do it on the interceptor. If I did it would end up as your vanilla nub Yaw to turn move.

Frigate pilots employ this method for their anti interceptor turns tho. It's a quick way to about turn in a slow frigate. But instead of flicking the mouse backwards to 180 we pitch vertically down to force the frigate to nose dive as we Q&E to turn the ship faster.