Hello and welcome to my guide to Gimbal, hell, probably welcome to Gimbal itself! I noticed there weren't any yet, and since there's no tutorial...so here I am, taking my shot at this.

Starting off in Gimbal isn't fun, it can be really frustrating. In fact I hated my first hour on Gimbal, mainly since you lack the budget to make a good ship.
But I'm going to try to teach you the basics of making a good (allround) ship.

First of all: You see the stock ships you get in Gimbal? Yeah, yeaaah...They're pretty much...crap. But that's okay, after all one of the main things Gimbal is about is developing your own ship.

So the first thing you probably want to do in Gimbal is make a ship suiting you and your playstyle, so this is what this guide is going to be about!

The ship I made as example for this tutorial is this:

It comes at a 1750 price, 50 below your starting budget, hurray! Feel free to use it ingame as your starting ship if you'd like, apparently the game saves ships as png images, so if you put this into you hanger file in your game files, you (hopefully) should have it.


Most bits n pieces are locked at start ingame, but don't fear, after +-10hours of gameplay you'll be all maxed out.

I'll get more indepth about the features in the next sections.

As you start out, most of these frames will be locked, in matter of fact, all will be locked except for the first three ones, of which, in my opinion, only the bullfrog platform is decent (which I used for the ship). The Airstabber platform is interesting too, excellent if you want to dodge everything, but if you get hit, the ship pretty much is scrap metal, whilst the bullfrog can survive a few hits.

Later on you'll unlock more n more platforms, getting more and more interesting, ranging from more agile, low drag platforms to bulky turtle platforms, and even a stealth one! (that's right, you can go stealth in this game, determined by the "visibility" attribute of your ship)

Structure is basicly to extend your ship to put extra parts on, I haven't seen many people do it, but hey, your choice.

As a wise man once said: "You never can have too much POWER" Very true indeed.

You have three main types of engines ingame: normal thrusters, maneuvring thrusters and boosters. The last one is unlocked at higher level and not so commonly used, so I won't talk about it in this guide.

First of all: Engine placement is critical, you will like to use to use mirror placement for this, or maybe even "snap to grid" Since if they aren't symmetrical, your ship will be very hard to steer.

Thrusters: the engines that will make you go forward! Break sound barriers! And...make you crash into stuff. How many, and which size you use will largely affect your playstyle. My playstyle is more slightly heavy like, but still maneuvrable, so most of my ships have top speed of about 500-800 mph (which results in using about 4+ heavy thrusters). You'll have to see what works best for you, the only way to find this out is to play the damn game.

Maneuvring thrusters, yes, the tricky bit, you'll have to program these fine ladies yourself. Do not fear, it's simply clicking on them and indicating on which key they should fire up, just like with your controller settings. I personally always use a design with one thruster in front and one thruster, firing up in different directions, causing the ship to spin, which works out quite well, just twitchy at low speeds.

Now about Stabilizers:

What are they for? To stablize your ship? Yes, as in giving it aerodynamics. Without these fins the ship will draft sideways freely, which can be hard to steer, so you'll want atleast 1-2 of them on your ship, but once again, preference.
Be warned though, put on too many, and your ship won't turn well anymore.

Yesss, yessss, time to introduce the things to say "Yippee-a-yay-mother*BEEP*er" with.

As a rookie, you'll start with the first row of weapons, I think they're about as good, except that "sight" and "flare launcher" aren't weapons.
For your interest:
-"Sight" pretty much has no real use as far as I've noticed.
-Flare launcher? You'll want one of these to shoot "decoys" for missiles, with luck the missile that got shot at you will go nom the tasty flare instead. It got both "shoot" mode and "drop", which one you prefer is once again, up to you.

What you will learn very quickly, is that aiming without a turret...well, let's just say it's not going to happen, some might disagree with me about that, but I think turrets are essential on any ship which isn't 100% missiles.

How to make a turret? Well, put the main turret down where you'd like, and in order to make it work, you'll need a mouse targeting cpu appointed to it.

And then ofcourse, put the guns on it. With some effort you can fit 4 small XR-38 guns onto a single turret, or 3 50mm guns, or 3 light lasers,... just try to fit as much on as you and your budget can.

Later on you can use "slaver turret" cpu and even "ballistic" cpu:
-Slaver turret means that one turret can make other turrets follow her, which will save you about 30 credits on each additional turret, but watch out, once your slaver turret is taken out, the ones following it won't work.
-Ballistic cpu, one hell of an expensive *BEEP* for top ranks, but it can be soooo worth it. Basicly it aims for you, 100% accurate considering current heading, course, etc. But beware, your target can change course, and it can be a ♥♥♥♥♥ to aim when your enemy is shooting flares.

Let's start with sensors:

These boys will detect ships at (longer) range for you, very useful against stealthy ships. You'll want atleast the basic one, or the enemy might pop out of nowhere (quite litterally).
The default key to use them is enter, be warned though, by using the sensor, you'll give away your position.

And thennn armor:

Very important once you get past 2000-2500 budget mark, but once again, matter of preference. Although I would recommend to atleast put armor around your important modules, such as your turret/gun and maneuvring thrusters. Fully armored turtle targets can be very tough blokes until the best weapons come into play, so as rookie...avoid them, don't be stupid, they can't chase you, and you don't need to get into a dodgefight you can't win.

Last but not least, magazines!

As you'll notice quickly, you run out of ammo, fast. One way to reload is to head back to your carrier and "land" on it by flying ontop of it. But this is valuable time lost to your team, hell, if you even can make it back there. So you'll want additional ammo quite soon. Sadly the ammo types for the magazines get unlocked one at a time, so this, quite frankly, sucks.

If you haven't gotten this game yet, and feeling itchy to start making your own airship...what you waiting for? It's hardly more expensive than dinner...well, depends where and how, but still.

oh, and if you want to use the beginner ship I gave earlier is programmed to run on zqsd keys, so you might want to reprogram that.

Good luck on the battlefield, grinding your way up and see you there!

Dragawn / "Phantom Crow" in Gimbal

Feel free to ask away!