Hi! Welcome to Crazy Otto's Skimmer Rentals! We would like to thank you for choosing us as your provider for high speed, white knuckle entertainment for your birthday, wedding, midlife crisis or other special occasion. My name is Otto von Kewl, and I am excited to be your guide as we go through a few key points to ensure your enjoyment and safety. You know, I might be a five-time top finisher of the Hellas 3000 and Second Best Rookie in the 2235 Marineris series, but I also remember more humble times when I just started Skimmin', and if you follow my advice, who knows, maybe some day you will also feature in your own advertisements all over the Mars Public NetComm! But first, please make sure you have filled your waiver by the door, and let's get started with some basics.

Before we get started, if you haven't, please complete the in-game tutorials to become familiar with skimmer controls and basic functions. If you have already completed these tutorials, you will have noticed that a Skimmer is essentially an aircraft that uses thrust instead of lift to travel across the Martian surface. In simple terms, it can move forwards, up, down and turn side to side. In addition to this, it can also boost forward, "jump" by boosting upwards, and adjust its power-to-lift ratio through its "bias". This may seem like a lot, but essentially, piloting a Skimmer comes down to two factors: altitude, and speed.

Your altitude is a product of your bias and your pitch. The higher your bias, the lower you will be; the lower you are, the grippier your lift vectors will be. Your goal is to be at as high a bias as possible while not scraping your Skimmer on the slightest jump (which for me tends to be around 68-70%) and using your pitch to adjust for terrain. You basically want to minimize using the "jump" button by countering dips, ramps, and basically making sure that your forward momentum is not yeeted towards the sky or into the ground. Which is important, because...

Now, you might be surprised to learn that speed is kind of important when racing Skimmers. It's true! But just beyond the fact that faster = gooderer, it's important to understand that you need to go fast in order to go faster. Your radiators will cool more the faster you go, so keeping a high average speed is more important than a high instantaneous speed, most of the time. Yeah, you will probably do that corner faster if you do a tight turn and peel off with a boost, but doing that will also slow you down a lot, which in turn means you'll overheat faster, and end up slower. While there's a place for both styles of turn in Skimmer piloting, ideally smooth turns where you are able to keep your speed are preferrable. Just like with your pitch, you want to avoid wasting your energy by spending as much time as possible thrusting forward and not sideways.

With these principles, go ahead and take a stock Entrapod for a few practice laps in Noctis Loop. Experiment with wider and narrower turns, try pulsing your boosts instead of doing long ones to keep a more consistent speed throughout, play around with the bias, pitch appropriately to adjust for terrain. Once you master this, you're good to go! Hop on the lead league, try the different skimmers available in the Shop, and have fun playing Vector 36. Wish you luck!

But you're not here just to learn about driving a skimmer, are you?

No. You're here because you know there's more to it. You want to tinker, you want to customize. You want to mess around. You want to... to... fiddle and MEDDLE on the dark arts of uh... Skimmer meddling. Heh heh.

In that case, my friend, what do you say we take a little stroll down to the garage and get those hands... greasy?

Look, don't look at me like that, it's nothing weird, I just wanted to sound kinda mysterious and badass. Whatever, let's go.

Right! So, before we get started with the more advanced aspects of Skimmer construction and piloting, it's important to open your third eye. Stop chuckling, alright? I'm still on court sorting out the last customer that took that the wrong way. Look, it's very easy, you just need to breathe in, breathe out, picture a single hand clapping, then focus on the following:


That's it, that's all there is to it. Not that terrible, was it? But you need to understand that what you see as a vehicle is just a metal box with components strapped to it, and every component will do their job in isolation. The fact that it can stay hovering and moving forward is just a result of its position and function in relationship to the others, and while it is a complex equilibrium of parts and behaviors, at the end of the day, it all comes down to three things that result from all the individual parts that are tacked onto this metal box: its center of mass, center of thrust, and its geometric reference. All you're doing when putting a skimmer together is playing around with these centers.

I won't go over what individual component does as the in-game reference and Sp4m's very cool and detailed guide already covers that, my intention here is to explain skimmers on a more high level to make it easier for you to get a grasp of the basic concepts that go into construction. Once you understand them, you will be free to mess around with parts and build and customize them to your heart's content.

Let's go ahead and open the garage screen on "edit" mode. To make it easier to visualize, click on an internal component category, like the gyro or diverter.




This is just a static reference for the Skimmer frame and its only function is to show you how far from the center a component is located. You can make your other centers as far as you like from this one, but it will help you gauge the "character" of your build. For now, let's just go ahead and ignore it.

It indicates the center of uh... well, mass of all the stuff strapped to the Skimmer body. If you wanted to balance it on a beam, that's where the beam would go: this is the effective center of your design. It could technically go anywhere, but its placement will affect how the Skimmer handles and reacts to inputs. If you put a lot of weight on the back, you're going to get more oversteer and you might even lose control on turns. Move it too far forward, and you're liable to understeer, or worse, scrape your Skimmer on every upward slope you come across. And you don't want to be liable, don't you? That's what I thought.

When starting out, my recommendation is to try and have it as low as possible, and towards the front of the ship. This will help keeping your Skimmer stable on turns and avoid oversteering. Most skimmers are equipped with a gyro to help with control, and while you can put it anywhere, [as far as anyone can tell, its position does not matter for the purposes of the simulation. Idk, I think it looks sweet down the middle lol]

The big one. The core and soul of your Skimmer, and the source of oh so many headaches. The Center of Thrust is the single most important concept you need to learn when understanding Skimmer construction and modification.

There are two components to the Center of Thrust, and the first one is the ball itself. This could, again, be theoretically anywhere, but it indicates where your lift force is the strongest. The center of its suspension, if you were to use ground vehicles as a reference. This means that, the closest it is to the center of mass, the easier it will be for your lift thrusters to overcome gravity as a whole, and the furthest towards one end it is, the more your front or back will try to lift up.

The vertical position of the Center of Thrust will also indicate how strong your repulsive force is, or how high your Skimmer will hover for a given Bias value. You want to maximize how much force you are getting from each thruster, and this will help you gauge your thrust to mass ratio while putting a ship together.

As a rule of thumb, you want your Center of Thrust as low as possible, and relatively ahead of the Center of Mass so it can deal with terrain easier. But, the closer it is to it, the better your Skimmer will control. Why? Because a lot of the control you exert over your Thrusters will consist in changing their angle or power. This is where the second component of the Center of Thrust comes in: The blue arrow.


The blue arrow coming out of this white ball indicates the direction of the downward force exerted by all the lift thrusters. This, in conjunction with the Center's position will determine the attitude of your Skimmer.




This is a stock Nanoweave Entrapod. You will notice that its Center of Thrust is slightly tilted forwards. This is mostly due to the forward orientation of its front thrusters, which you can see here:




If you go ahead and turn it on, you will notice it has a tendency to lift its nose in respect to the horizon.




This is because Skimmers generally are more concerned with what it's ahead of them than behind them, and this design makes them easier and safer to control. The forward tilt serves both to dampen changes in elevation, and to compensate for how forward the Center of Thrust is in relation to the Center of Mass.

You can eyeball if a skimmer will try to pitch up, down, or stay level when left alone by the position of the Center of Thrust, and the direction of its vector. Ideally, you will want it to be as level as possible but, just like with our stock Entrapod above, tilting it towards the front will make your skimmer easier to pilot.

This also means that you can statically balance a Skimmer by simply changing the rotation of your thrusters. The further down they point, the more force they will exert, but the less of a dampening effect they will have on bumps, ramps, and landing (other than straight down). You can, of course, further change your Center of Thrust by moving your thrusters, or putting in more powerful ones.




Now, here's the kicker: Remember when I told you that Skimmers are just a collection of parts? Right. Trust me, there is oh so much more to it, but for the time being it is important to understand that when you move a control axis, you are affecting the angle and power that these thrusters are outputting, and in turn, moving the center of thrust around your ship.

For the purposes of demonstration, let's take this same stock Entrapod, turn it on, and tilt the stick forward. When you tilt the stick forward, you are reducing the power to the front repulsors, and increasing it on the back.




This not only affects your axis inputs: When you press the "jump" button on a Skimmer, you're just hitting an override that sets your bias to 10%, meaning it's sending 90% of its diverter energy to your lift thrusters. Therefore, the stock Entrapod will lift up much more when jumping than this second one (at speed).

This all means that, in Skimmers, it all comes down to these centers. They will define how your Skimmer runs, how it will react to inputs, what its behavior and characteristics will be, and while it really comes down to how you pilot it on top of all that, understanding centers will allow you to shape your Skimmer the way you want it to be.

There is juuust one more tinsy teeny tiny wrinkle to centers, and that is


When you took that Entrapod for a ride five years ago before you started reading this section, you probably noticed that it didn't just lift off the ground into the blue wild yonder when you hit that thruster, despite its neutral attitude being nose up. That is because There is a second Center of Thrust, which is mostly governed by your main thruster. Go ahead and open the "Thrust" tab on your garage to see it better.



This is the direction your main thruster will burn towards. The game will try and line it up to your Center of Mass automatically, however, ultimately, you want it to be thrusting as straight back as possible, while providing a stable attitude. In the stock Entrapod, ths thrust goes more or less straight over the Center of Mass, meaning that it will correct most of the "tilting up" problem that its thruster arrangement causes, but, this can also always be fine tuned by controlling its angle.

So how can we tell this by all these arrows and crosses? Well, the thing is, we can't. Not accurately, anyway. Here is where we cross from the realm of data, and into the fuzzy world of "feeling things out". And that's when we need to talk about...

Now that we've gone over the centers and how they interact with each other, go ahead and click "clear all" on your Garage to remove all components from your Entrapod. Now, I want you to put it back together by using the three centers at your disposal as you see fit. Internals can go anywhere on the allotted space, so you can put them however makes you happy. Remember to use the "rotation" tool on your lift vectors to point them the way you wanted (you will probably have to click on an internal category to see the Center of Thrust, so keep alternating between them as you adjust them).

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Remember to always save your modifications when editing your skimmer! Otherwise they will not apply.




You can go back to a previous iteration by clicking on the arrows on the Skimmer selection menu.




As an example, you can rearrange your Entrapod like this:



Now, in this example you can see how I have moved the diverter forward and made the front vectors point more downwards. Once you are happy with your general placement, go ahead and switch to the "holodeck" testing mode, turn the skimmer on, and without touching the stick, give it some thrust, then boost for a little, and see how the ship reacts.

(a note, you'll see a HUD showing speed, altitude and whatnot in the screenshots. For some reason, you will need to click on "control skimmer", exit test mode, and click it again for the HUD to appear.)




Now, our example skimmer has some problems. See, due to how far forward our Center of Thrust is in relation to our Center of Mass, the fact that I have pointed the thrusters straight down, and the angle at which the main thruster is mounted, it means that the front section will try and lift up the ground, and while the game has tried to compensate my main thruster's position, the skimmer will try and lift off until the lift thrusters lose effectiveness, at which point it will come back down. This will cause the skimmer to undulate as it thrusts forward, and even worse, boosting will cause a runaway lift effect that can yeet you upwards, wasting your momentum




To correct this, you can change your main thruster's angle to reduce this waviness. In general, a negative thruster angle will change your pitch downwards, so if I want to reduce this problem, I'll give it a couple more negative degrees, from (in this case) -1 to -4.


That's better. Notice that I've managed to hit a higher speed and lower altitude, but we are still getting a little too much lift. Let's get it to -8.


Now I'm having the opposite problem. I'm still kind of wavy, and when boosting, my ship points towards the ground. This is an indication that I've overcorrected, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Now, if I change the thruster angle to -6...


Ta-da! The skimmer is still somewhat wavy, but the amplitude of the waves is stable enough that my altitude range is way narrower and I'm focusing more thrust towards where I want it to go, which is increasing my forward speed. Some skimmer configurations will fly straighter than others, and that all comes down to where the skimmer's centers are, but by following these steps, you can create a functional skimmer from start to finish without leaving your garage.

As a rule of thumb, you should try to aim for the least possible angle in your thruster that keeps you in a straight line. This is not only to improve the general efficiency of your design, but also to minimize the effect boosting will have in your altitude, resulting in a higher stability.

...And that's all there is to it!

...That's what I would say if this was all there is to it.

It isn't.

I am so, so sorry.

Right. Okay.

So, good news first, you do not have to mess around with ECUs much. The most an intermediate Skimmer pilot should mess with is the diverter settings. But fully understanding this part will unlock total and complete freedom in regards what you can build, and how it controls.

To open the ECU configuration, click on the blue circle under the "ECU" tab, labeled "control".




Your ECU controls the behavior of each thruster and the diverter in your ship. Clicking the diverter will allow you to set how much of a boost it sends to the main thruster when you boost, as well as the initial bias of your ship at the start of a race, and how fast holding the "bias up" or "bias down" input will change the value.




Why would you want to limit your boost? Because it will heat your Skimmer less and provide a more gradual boost, which in turn will allow your radiators to be more efficient, and help you boost for longer. Your ship will end up overheating regardless because heat is exponential, but it will let you boost for longer, resulting in a more consistent speed, which in turn will cool you down faster, which will let you boost again faster. From here it's just a matter to try different configurations out, and see what you like the best.

This is probably the only setting you need to touch on your ECU. But, just for kicks, let's see what clicking on a thruster shows:




It is very. Very. VERY important to understand that these settings are per thruster. I know, I know, "duh", but you need to keep this in mind. Certain actions require one thruster in a pair to do one thing, and the other thruster to do the opposite, so if you touch 'em, you want to make sure that every thruster is configured properly.

Parameters: Each thruster in your Skimmer can do up to three things independently. You can add two actions to an axis, or make each axis have a different effect on it. The sky is the limit... as long as that sky falls within those Ps.

You can either control the angle of a thruster, or the power it puts out. The power is self-explanatory: the more you move the axis, the more power will come out of that thruster. In regards to it's "angle", components will turn relative to their placement like a tank's turret according to that axis. The only exception to this is the main thruster, which instead will turn side to side like a rudder, with its center of rotation at the very front.

The square at the very right of the tooltip is your "invert" function. Predictably, it inverts the output in relation to its input, so it will treat a value of "0" as "100%" and vice versa. There's a very important caveat to that, however: For the very specific case of your lift thruster angle, the output for the left ones is already mirrored by default. This means that you don't need to invert them individually. We'll see this more in detail further on.

This is the axis the ECU will take as a reference for whatever you set as an input. the component will always behave the same regardless of axis. If you set your thruster to the pitch axis, it will still tilt from side to side when you move that axis, exactly the same as if you set it to your "yaw axis". It will simply read the value of that axis, and translate it to that thruster's angle or power.

The axis are as follows, left to right:

Yaw: This is the X axis (side to side) on the stick mapped as "move" on the settings.
Pitch: This is the Y axis (up/down) on the stick mapped as "move" on the settings.
Roll: This is the axis mapped as "rudder" in the settings.
Thrust: This is the axis mapped as "thrust" in the settings.

This is the uppper and lower limit you want to set to that action. In the vast, VAST majority of cases, you just want it to be symmetrical, and will essentially dictate how much a full input can change the output.

Now, for funsies, let's group the different actions set on a default Skimmer by axis, and see how each component reacts to which input.

When you move your Yaw axis...
- Your Front Thrusters [P1] will change their angle (by 20 degrees).
- Your Back Thrusters [P1] will change their angle (by 80 degrees!)
- Your Main Thruster [P1] will change its angle (by 80 degrees as well!)

When you move your Pitch axis...
- Your front Thrusters [P2] will change their power up to 100%
- Your back Thrusters [P2] will change their power up to 100% (but inverted)

When you move your Rudder axis...
- The RIGHT front AND back Thrusters [P3] will change their power up to 90%
- The LEFT front AND back thrusters [P3] will change their power up to 90% (but inverted).

When you move your Thrust axis...
- Your Main Thruster [P2] will change its Thrust between -10% and 100%,

And that's how the sausage is made. Rolling is just differential thrust between the left and side lift vectors, and all 5 of its thrusters working together is what gives the Entrapod its signature drifty handling that's fun for all the family. And it also means that with a little elbow grease (and thrusters), you can make a skimmer do virtually anything. Do you want to control your pitch through your vector angle rather than power? Go nuts! Do you want to make a drifty machine, or a virtually unsteerable missile? Sure! Place more lift thrusters with custom behaviors? Hey, why not place a couple of Baris 50 and use them as brakes?

...how about overhauling your entire control scheme? Sure, we can do that.

And here we are. It all has come to this. You've managed to make it through every intrincacy of Skimmer design, you've mastered the centers, you've opened your soul to the principles of building one, you've even risked your sanity by delving into the impenetrable, mind-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ complexity of ECU settings (you signed a waiver for a reason, sorry!), and now it is time for us to put all of that knowledge together to create [thunder cracking] THE VON KEWL SPECIAL.

What this is, really, is just a set of Ps to boop into your ECU to make your skimmer control the way I like. It will make them feel more like a plane and less like a car, and it will give you more fine tune control to get your Skimmer to do what you want it to do by using the three axis at your disposal instead of just two of them. It is more involved, but in the end I'm very happy with it, and it's a great example to see what you can really do with ECU settings.

I will give some orientative ranges, but feel free to change them up as you see fit. The important part here are the inputs and outputs.

AGAIN, IMPORTANT, these settings are per-thruster. You have to set them for each one of them. I will list each P of each component in order. Don't get lazy and go through each of them.

[P1]: IN: Yaw OUT: Angle RANGE: -40 to 40
[P2]: IN: Yaw OUT: Force Inverted RANGE: -90 to 90
[P3]: IN: Pitch OUT: Force RANGE: -100 to 100

[P1]: IN: Yaw OUT: Angle RANGE: -40 to 40
[P2]: IN: Yaw OUT: Force RANGE: -90 to 90
[P3]: IN: Pitch OUT: Force RANGE: -100 to 100

[P1]: IN: Roll OUT: Angle RANGE: -80 to 80
[P2]: IN: Pitch OUT: Force Inverted RANGE -80 to 80
[P3]: IN: Yaw OUT: Force Inverted RANGE -90 to 90

[P1]: IN: Roll OUT: Angle RANGE: -80 to 80
[P2]: IN: Pitch OUT: Force Inverted RANGE -80 to 80
[P3]: IN: Yaw OUT: Force RANGE -90 to 90

[P1]: IN: Yaw OUT: Angle RANGE: -50 to 50
[P2]: IN: Thrust OUT: Force RANGE -10 to 100
[P3]: IN Roll OUT: Angle RANGE: -80 to 80

Look, I know it's tedious, but make sure all the Ps are in order. What we're essentially doing is just increasing the angle deflection of the front thrusters for "yaw" and moving P3 from "roll" to "yaw". For the back thrusters we're setting P3 from "roll" to "yaw" as well, and P1 from "yaw" to "roll", and finally we're decreasing the deflection of the main thruster on "yaw" and making a new, higher range P3 on "roll". That's about it.

Okay, so what have we accomplished here? Basically, you now have two very different forms of turning at your disposal:

- When you turn with your main stick, the turning will be done with your front thrusters and your main thruster only, while rolling you into the turn by applying differential thrust on your front and back thrusters. This, coupled with the more limited angle on the main thruster, will make a more gradual "speed turn" while keeping as much thrust pointed backwards as possible.

- When using the Rudder, however, your back thrusters will turn almost 90 degrees in opposite directions and your Main Thruster will also tilt further as well whipping your Skimmer around. (This is essentially a vanilla turn)

This essentially gives you independent control of the front and back of your Skimmer, and both inputs can be combined to perform "coordinated turns" that will help you exert better control over your attitude while turning. You will be able to fine tune your attitude much more easily, and choose whether you want to make a fast pass through a turn or whip it around a corner, and making it easier to get out of the way of an incoming rock or recover from drift almost instantaneously.

Now, for the big question:


I have no idea, lol.

In theory by using the von Kewl Special you are wasting less thrust by not angling your back thrusters so much on quick turns, and it's easier to thread the needle through a circuit while maintaining as high a speed as possible. But to be honest, I can't see much difference with my times, and it is a more complex control method. I mean, I like it more, and I've made my best lap times with it, so at least it shouldn't be worse. At the end of the day, as long as it works for you and it makes the game more fun and enjoyable for you, go ahead and have fun!

And that's it. Really really it. If you've made it to this, I would like to commend you on your resilience and determination to understand Vector 36. I hope you get to appreciate its mechanical complexity as much as I do, and I hope I helped you a little to navigate its mind-boggling complexity. See you in the track! And watch the paint.