Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

Yeah, that's it, doesn't look like it has changed much over the years. I remember a kid showing up with his father's leather biker vest that hung down almost to his knees, my beebees bounced off of him. Next time I came with a 3 foot x 2 foot sheet of 1/4 inch plywood with an improvised handle on the back, we were like a couple of ironclads going at it, we later on graduated to paintball guns playing capture the flag.

Nowadays there is quite a lot of "airsoft" activity - much lower muzzle velocity and plastic BBs. More realistic than paintball, though the activity centres tend to run both I think. I don't do in for this mock-battle stuff but I see in the dealer's that the gear looks very "military" - I can see why people come to the attention of "armed response" if they brandish them in public. I couldn't tell if the pistols were real without picking one up.
 
Nowadays there is quite a lot of "airsoft" activity - much lower muzzle velocity and plastic BBs. More realistic than paintball, though the activity centres tend to run both I think. I don't do in for this mock-battle stuff but I see in the dealer's that the gear looks very "military" - I can see why people come to the attention of "armed response" if they brandish them in public. I couldn't tell if the pistols were real without picking one up.
It's considered fool hardy to wave those around in public here, our cops wouldn't hesitate to draw their weapons. I remember those paintball guns could put a nice little raspberry on you if you didn't wear the plastic armor, I had fun with it. When I was in the Marine Corps, they were very serious about marksmanship, some could say even fanatical, I fit right in and enjoyed my time shooting and working targets in the butts.
 
I'm getting to enjoy these assassination missions.

The one I just did had a slightly different flavour. When I got to the settlement, I approached with gun ports open. This was a mistake. There were four ships circling the place - and two were 'Conda's. I barely made it back into orbit.

Second time 'round, I came in passively and landed about a click away. Drove the Scorpy up and used the scanner to scope out my target. Once this was acquired, I drove around until I could drive up behind a building. I mooched around a little on the rooftops until I spotted my mark, then waited until she stood still.

Then let rip with the Executioner. Whop! No alarms, no dead body detected. Easy peasy.

Drove back to the ship, took off and waked back to the contract system.

Wha.....!? Interdiction! She had friends and they were verily vexed. Still, I was in my Viper IV with most excellent and bodacious engines so evading the blighters was pretty easy.

5 MI's later made the whole episode a fun time.

Sometimes, it can be easy to get complacent then you get thrown that inevitable curve ball.
 
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aI'm getting to enjoy these assassination missions.

The one I just did had a slightly different flavour. When I got to the settlement, I approached with gun ports open. This was a mistake. There were four ships circling the place - and two were 'Conda's. I barely made it back into orbit.

Second time 'round, I came in passively and landed about a click away. Drove the Scorpy up and used the scanner to scope out my target. Once this was acquired, I drove around until I could drive up behind a building. I mooched around a little on the rooftops until I spotted my mark, then waited until she stood still.

Then let rip with the Executioner. Whop! No alarms, no dead body detected. Easy peasy.

Drove back to the ship, took off and waked back to the contract system.

Wha.....!? Interdiction! She had friends and they were verily vexed. Still, I was in my Viper IV with most excellent and bodacious engines so evading the blighters was pretty easy.

5 MI's later made the whole episode a fun time.

Sometimes, it can be easy to get complacent then you get thrown that inevitable curve ball.
That's what makes this game so fun, I try to outsmart my assassins, I had 4 Annies pop out of hi-wake right next to the Dove Enigma one of those flight control/NPC cop barracks ships. A couple of Annies opened up on me and the megaship tour them a new one, the other 2 ran, I didn't even get a chance to claim a bounty. 🤷‍♂️
 
My research regarding the SRV HUD update didn't lead me to a definite conclusion.

What I learned is that your NPC pilot will only be able to join you if a fighter bay is installed.

And I saw some differences in what the new HUD element shows with different ships.
Deploying from the Stargazer or Curious Dryad, the symbol shows "Follow", when I deployed the SRV from the Mosquito (with my pilot on board) the symbol would say "Defend".

My guess would be that this new HUD symbol is the harbinger for an upgrade that will be implemented in the near future.
 
Hmm. I didn't think to check whether a worried message meant you were in a Scythable system - might be some useful info for the Cmdr in there. I'll try to be more systematic when I next give it a go.

After a few more evac runs I think there might be something to this. So far, if a passenger says they are keen to get away from the Thargoids then there's always been a Scythe hyper/interdiction interfering with the next jump. If they say they are glad to be away from the Thargoids then there are no more interdictions. There have been three runs where the passengers were strangely silent until saying thank you at the end, and I wasn't interdicted at all.

Hardly scientific proof, but the pattern has been consistent so far.

PS the credits for evacs are more variable than before U16, but are much higher. My new passenger Cutter is seeing 50M+ per run between Ebisu and Tarach Tor.

<edit> The last run added almost 150M even after my inactive NPC pilot took their 10%. Crikey.
 
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After a few more evac runs I think there might be something to this. So far, if a passenger says they are keen to get away from the Thargoids then there's always been a Scythe hyper/interdiction interfering with the next jump. If they say they are glad to be away from the Thargoids then there are no more interdictions. There have been three runs where the passengers were strangely silent until saying thank you at the end, and I wasn't interdicted at all.

Hardly scientific proof, but the pattern has been consistent so far.

PS the credits for evacs are more variable than before U16, but are much higher. My new passenger Cutter is seeing 50M+ per run between Ebisu and Tarach Tor.

<edit> The last run added almost 150M even after my inactive NPC pilot took their 10%. Crikey.
The higher risk merits the higher reward.

And with those Scythes, the risk definitely rose quite a bit.
 
The higher risk merits the higher reward.

And with those Scythes, the risk definitely rose quite a bit.
With an engineered Cutter and an ECM it's not turning out particularly risky - ithe ship can permaboost around 500 so the Scythe is in the rear view mirror pretty quickly, and the ECM keeps time spent in its company to a minimum. The ship has 6A prismatic and boosters, but to be honest I'm not sure the bad guys have landed a shot yet. And it's only 4 jumps each way.

This is hubris, isn't it. I'll be facing a 21M rebuy later today 😀
 
Random shots from my latest escapades:

A broody place...

STVKoHe.jpg


Boosting into yonder stratosphere...

YQbqWtT.jpg


What nuking the entire site from orbit does to the human body... (for some reason, this reminds me of "The Thing")

thQEItI.jpg
 
With an engineered Cutter and an ECM it's not turning out particularly risky - ithe ship can permaboost around 500 so the Scythe is in the rear view mirror pretty quickly, and the ECM keeps time spent in its company to a minimum. The ship has 6A prismatic and boosters, but to be honest I'm not sure the bad guys have landed a shot yet. And it's only 4 jumps each way.

This is hubris, isn't it. I'll be facing a 21M rebuy later today 😀

Every time the passengers worried about Thargoids I was interdicted before/during the next jump, if they were silent there was no interdiction, with one exception - there was precisely one occasion on which the passengers were silent but I was still interdicted by a Scythe. Not sure if this invalidates the hypothesis above, or whether there's a % chance of each passenger talking to you, and none of them happened to trigger that time.

On the Cutter hubris front I didn't need a rebuy, but did have the predicted humbling experience when two hunters pulled me over. One of them got close enough to cast the yellow lightning, so my shields disappeared and they managed to do a bit of hull damage before I got away. I'd assumed they must be Glaives to get that close, but just as I was going into hyperspace I got a message "warning: foreign body attached" which I didn't think Glaives were into. Maybe I somehow got bracketed between two Scythes? Boosting away from one took me towards the other? Everything was going on behind me so I didn't really see them. Might check if the Inara logs have anything useful when they get updated (am playing via GeforceNow so no access to local files).

Well, that's my morning session wrapped up. Credits-wise the new Cutter amply repaid its costs, if I log in later I might dare check what fitting it out did to my stock of engineering mats...
 
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