The details

Things Directive 47 does to your ship without being asked. There is one so far, and it is off.

Why this is its own page

Everything else Directive 47 does happens because you said something. The sentence you said is the permission — you asked for the gear, so the gear is what it presses.

An action that fires on a journal event has no sentence behind it. Nobody asked, nobody is watching for it, and if it goes wrong at the wrong moment you find out from the game rather than from Directive 47. That is a different kind of thing to agree to, so it gets a different kind of agreement: each one is off by default and switched on individually, and none of them can be switched on by the AI.

One switch per action, not one for the category. If there were a single “act on your own” toggle, the next thing added here would arrive already enabled for everyone who wanted the first one — and that is permission for one thing being spent on another.

The arrival honk

Fires the discovery scanner after each hyperspace jump.

Elite has no “honk” binding, because the discovery scanner is not a button — it is a fire-group weapon. It goes off when you hold primary fire in analysis mode with the scanner in your current fire group. So this holds your fire button, for the six seconds the scan takes.

Three things have to be true, and it tells you when they are not:

• Analysis mode. If you arrive in combat mode in supercruise, where your hardpoints are stowed, it switches the HUD to analysis mode, honks, and switches back to combat mode once the honk is over. It holds fire only once the game reports analysis mode; if that has not happened within two seconds, it says so and holds nothing. In normal space holding fire could fire a weapon, so there it does not switch and says this instead:

  I did not honk: the discovery scanner only fires in analysis mode, and you are in combat mode.
  

• The scanner in your current fire group. Directive 47 cannot see your fire groups. If you hear “The honk did not take” after every jump, this is the likely reason.
• A fire button it can press. On Elite’s default keyboard preset that is Mouse_1, which works. On a stick it does not, and you get told which device it is on.

It arms on the jump and fires once the tunnel ends, because during the witchspace tunnel the game has the controls and a held button goes nowhere. If thirty seconds pass without that happening, the arm expires rather than waiting to surprise you later.

It checks that the honk worked: Elite records a discovery scan when one completes. If none arrives within three seconds of the hold ending, and you are still flying in analysis mode, it holds fire once more. If that also produces no scan, it says so:

The honk did not take

It presses nothing into another window. If Elite is not the window in front when it is about to honk, it waits as long as a missed hold would, about eight seconds, and tries once more from the start, switching to analysis mode if it needs to. If Elite is still not in front, it says this once and does nothing more for that arrival:

Cannot honk since Elite is not the active window.

That line is also said in place of “The honk did not take” when a hold produced no scan and Elite is not in front by the end of the wait for it.

A honk you make by hand while it is waiting counts, and nothing is repeated. Apart from that one retry, it fires once per jump. It never fires for jumps that happened before Directive 47 started, which would otherwise mean a honk for every system you visited that afternoon.

Turning it on

“turn on the arrival honk” “stop honking on arrival”

Or the Honk on arriving in a system row in settings. Like every switch that reaches your keyboard, the AI cannot touch it — it can tell you whether it is on, and that is all.

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