Greetings from anuda nube

[Spudnic]

... yet the beginners ship (MkIII) must be aligned perfectly to enter as if the ship is huge.

The Cowell & MgRath Cobra MK III is actually quite a large ship - 130x30x65m - so you gotta get it right.

Ahhh. Must be that beginners will mostly be haulers at first rather than nimble, fast pirates.

[Cody]

Yep... you can dock an Adder on injectors whilst in full rotate no problem. A sweet little ship, is an iron-assed Adder.

[Norby]

The Cowell & MgRath Cobra MK III is actually quite a large ship - 130x30x65m

If landed in a football stadium:


Cobra Mk I can dock without rotate also if it is your goal, and has larger cargo capacity than an Adder.
You can try these variations with [wiki]Start_Choices[/wiki], or use my son's ship which is designed to dock without rolling and start with much larger cargo.

[Smivs]

The 'beginners ship', the Cobra Mk III is a legacy fron Oolite's inspiration, Elite.
In Elite you couldn't change your ship so you were given a very bare-bones version of the 'best' ship available, then you could equip and arm it as you progressed through the game so that a steady improvement could be made and you'd end up with the best ship in the Universe!
Of course in Oolite you can buy almost any ship available, including some very OTT uber-ships, so the start-point is not as important, but has been retained so we can stay true to Elite.
If Oolite was free-standing without the Elite legacy, the starter ship would more likely be a Cobra Mk I or similar.
Of course as well as upgrading, you can also 'downgrade' in Oolite, and indeed many commanders are tempted by the 'Iron Man' challenge of starting with a basic Adder and trying to work up from there.

[Norby]

There is a nice size comparsion in the  wiki (thank you Smivs!):

[Spudnic]

My ordered XBox 360 arrived and I am gradually getting things assigned. Having no guide lines makes it a hit and miss thing. Looks like it is going to work without additional drivers suggested in the WIKI. It appears to work without assigning buttons that I won't be using for a while. Wondering what some of you assign things to such as YAW , Acell/decell etc>guess I'll search around for typical Xbox control assignments. I think I am going to like this game since it has so many variables and choices.