Angels Fall First Space Combat Guide: Fighters, Flight Modes and Dogfighting

Space maps are half of Angels Fall First, and they play by different physics than the ground war. This guide covers the fighter game: getting into space, the two flight modes that decide every dogfight, the four fighter classes, weapons, and how to actually hit things. Capital ships get their own guide.

Getting into the fight

You spawn as infantry inside a location — a battleship, frigate or station. Find the hangar, board a craft, launch. Some scenarios instead warp you in from an off-map base; on those, warp beacons are your lifeline — fly to one to jump home for repairs and rearmament (bombers exempted: they cannot re-enter hyperspace, so their ammo is all they get).

Dying returns you to the deploy screen, where the spawn system matters: frigates and battleships are spawnable by everyone, smaller capitals only by their squad, and boarded enemy ships by anyone once a breach point exists. If your team’s big ships die, your team literally runs out of places to exist — which is why escorting them is not optional charity.

The one mechanic that separates pilots: gravity mode

Middle mouse toggles gravity (grav) mode, shown as the GR indicator (blue = on, yellow = off).

• Grav ON: the craft flies like a plane — thrust, lift, momentum follows the nose. Intuitive, stable, and predictable to your enemies.
• Grav OFF: Newtonian physics. Your momentum persists; the nose points wherever you like. You can travel one direction and shoot another, strafe-slide through turret arcs, and — the quiet economy trick — coast at boost speed indefinitely without burning boost, since nothing slows you in vacuum.

The skill expression is switching between them mid-fight. Cruise grav-off to conserve boost. Enter a turn fight grav-on for control. When a bandit saddles your six, kill grav, flip the nose 180°, and fire straight down your own exhaust trail while momentum carries you away — the classic Newtonian reversal, and the single most demoralising move you can put on a new pilot.

Roll with Q/E, boost with Shift (watch the right-hand gauge; it needs seconds to recharge), countermeasures on Z, view toggle on the period key, and N cycles subsystem targets on capital ships — guns, point defence, engines.

Hitting things: the target lead indicator

Projectiles have travel time and fighters are fast, so the HUD gives you a target lead indicator — aim your ship at it, not at the enemy. Head-on and tail-chase geometries need almost no lead; a fast crossing target can need dramatic lead. Two consequences:

• Deny lead to enemies: keep your motion lateral to their nose (grav-off strafing is exactly this).
• Take shots where lead is small: ambush from behind, or head-on with heavy armour.

On large ships the camera can move faster than the hull turns, so your cursor and your actual aim separate — watch where the ship points. To score hits, put the ship’s aim on the lead indicator.

The four fighter classes

Class	ULA / AIA	Guns	Slots (hull/elec)	Role
Interceptor	Rapier / Iret	1 cannon	2 / 2	Agility hunter — kills bombers, evades everything
Fighter	Sword / Firefly	2 cannons	2 / 1	The all-rounder; the right first craft
Assault fighter	Katana / Salamander	2 cannons + armour	1 / 1	Escort brawler — tanks point defence, bullies bombers
Bomber	Scimitar / Rakshasa	Guns + heavy bay	1 / 1	The capital-ship killer

Fly the middle fighter first. Interceptors punish every mistake and assault fighters teach you nothing about not being hit. Also on the roster: dropships (Dragoon/Cricket), which are flying spawn points and boarding tools rather than combatants — see the boarding section of the capital ships guide.

All fighters carry mine launchers. Mine a pursuit line during a dogfight or seed a capture point’s approach — pursuing pilots eat them constantly.

Weapons and hardpoints

Fighters are customised like everything else in AFF, against your budget. The armoury in brief:

Guns: the default TT402/MGA2 machine guns (MGA2 spins up); the Sigurn-Fost Flechette for knife-range work; faction cannon lines (ULA LSP bolts, AIA Tir-Boda plasma spheres with a charged secondary); ship-mounted shotguns (Twin ASG10-2 / Twin S77B); and two heavy autocannons — the Sigurn-Fost C90 (huge hits, small clip, no ammo variants, made for dropships and subsystems) and the Aeger TT18S (faster, easier against small craft, takes ammo types). There’s also a chargeable Ion Cannon, a pocket version of the capital-ship beam.

Missiles: AF1-AS and AFX-AS guided missiles (lock up to two targets), the Swarm launcher (eight rockets, eight locks, brutally hard to dodge), the slow inevitable HAL-4AS heavy missile, and Ackerson Red4 rocket pods for corvettes and subsystems. Note: drop pods on dropship spines currently interfere with missile locks — use guns on dropships.

Bomber heavy bay: torpedoes (slow, devastating, dodgeable by small hulls), the ULA Murchison RLCD railgun (less damage, instant hit) or the AIA Tir-Boda 800EU plasma projector (mid-velocity, good against escorts).

Countermeasures: currently the Shield Generator — a timed damage absorb on Z. Time it against torpedo impacts or a merge, not reflexively.

Upgrades: electronics (scrambler = slower enemy locks, motion sensor, EM mine detector, self-repair) and hull mods (armour vs boost vs ammo vs insulation vs anti-shock). Interceptors get the most slots; bombers the fewest.

Dogfighting doctrine

• Energy wins. Boost management and grav-off coasting beat raw aim. A pilot with boost in reserve dictates when the fight ends.
• Check GR before you commit. Fighting grav-on against a drifting opponent means their guns track you while yours chase their vapour trail.
• Countermeasure discipline. Z beats missile volleys only if you save it for them.
• Don’t tunnel. The pilot who kills you is the one you never tagged. Use G liberally — tagged targets feed your team’s awareness too.

Bomber runs that survive

Capital-ship AI gunners are extremely accurate at range; the open approach is a death sentence. The pattern that works: approach behind terrain (asteroids, station geometry, ice on Meudeverre), grav-off drift through the final gap, alpha the torpedoes at close range, and extend away below or above the hull’s gun coverage. Fit the AI tail gun and pursuing fighters pay for following. Fly with a wing — two bombers arriving with escort force the point-defence to choose, and whoever it ignores, kills.

Target subsystems with N: killing point-defence first makes every later run cheaper. Coordinate with your team’s own capital ships — a torpedo volley timed to the moment the enemy’s shields drop from a slugging match is how battleships actually die from the outside.

Related guides

• Capital ships & crew roles
• Loadout & budget system explained
• Map database — space maps