Bailng and then reboarding, out in clear air? That's a new one on me!

(3:31) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. While doing force-launching such as seen in BCM232, I inadvertently discovered that I could reboard the Banshee in mid-air, clear of any supporting surface. That was a major surprise because I've long thought that you need to have some support under your feet or nearby, before you can get a boarding prompt. Apparently I had that wrong. Anyway, this reboarding makes an amusing trick. Check it out! Update: I now have an article on force-launching.

Released April 29th 2017, gameplay recorded April 18th-27th 2017.

00:02 (Inadvertent discovery) Here's where I made my discovery. I'd been fooling around with tagging. One time I tagged the Banshee after bailing, then hit X to flip, in the hope of pushing the Banshee away. However, unexpectedly the prompt was a boarding prompt, not a flip prompt, so I ended up back aboard! And I was like, what just happened?

00:28 (Confirmation) Naturally I set about trying to repeat such a reboarding feat - this time without any tagging - and here's when I got clear confirmation of the phenomenon. Definitely no supporting surfaces near me when I board.

00:46 (Further examples) Now here are five other examples of the reboarding trick, featuring various boarding angles. In the final example I board after flipping the Banshee - confirming that reboarding is still possible after a flip. In all cases I point the Banshee down while ascending. That's needed, else when you bail you'll drop away from the Banshee.

01:58 (Bailing too early or late) Beginning a sequence of clips about some of the things that can go wrong, bailing too early tends to cause you to go higher than the Banshee, while bailing too late tends to make you go lower.

02:31 (Splatter danger) Getting splattered is quite a danger, and the Banshee's pointy canopy tends to be the main cause. In this clip it looks like it's stabbing me in the helmet!

02:41 (Banshee not level enough) When you get near the Banshee, it may not be level enough for you to board, assuming you're in a suitable place for a prompt. And if you flip it, the most likely outcome is that it'll get repelled from you, and you lose any chance of boarding.

02:56 (Hitting stuff) Obviously, things are easily messed up if the vacated Banshee hits anything. This is a bit of a comedy example, due to the almighty crashing sound of the Banshee just as I hit.

03:12 (Final trick) Something I was trying for fun was to do suicides like this, with two tags. One to get the Banshee almost destroyed, and another just before reboarding, to finish the job. It's actually quite hard, partly because the first blast causes flight deviation which makes you a lot more prone to bashing into something, especially the bottom ring. But I managed to get some decent clips, and this example was my favourite - partly because of the death cry, and also because you see quite a bit of flame.

Closing remarks One hazard not shown is the bottom ring and a few other surfaces, which you could easily hit during your ascent. You need to steer a path to some extent, to get a clean ascent. You can steer according to which way you're facing. The Banshee doesn't rise completely vertically; it gets some horizontal drift in the direction of the underside.

You may recall some mid-air reboarding in a few of my older movies involving a covie dropship in the twin bridges area. There's some in BCM100 and also in BCM111. In those cases I thought the reason for getting a boarding prompt was because the dropship was briefly giving me enough support, or had briefly given me enough. But perhaps that conclusion was wrong.

After discovering this reboarding possibility, I found (or re-found, because I may've seen it long ago) FrogBlast's co-op Banshee switch movie from 2002. It's another clear case of boarding in mid-air with no supporting surfaces around. FrogBlast described the trick here in the HBO forum.

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