I never used heatsinks, but sometimes the target station is a military outpost patrolled by Feds. To land there you need to select silent running for the last 5km. You can land before the temperature is too high, but if you mess up and need a bit more time, a heatsink would be useful.
If you do enough missions, there will always be an occasion when circumstances conspire against you to make you fail. Don't worry about failing. Overall, you should get a success rate of 95% or more, so just go back and get some more missions. You only lost a bit of time. Failing a few missions doesn't seem to affect anything. maybe if you keep failing it would be different.
That video is pretty much what I did, but it doesn't tell the full story. Other key points that I learnt:
- Don't hang about on outpost landing pads. Go immediately into the hangar and take off as soon as you're back out.
- If you're interdicted on the final run to the station, always play the mini-game, don't submit because they'll be straight back onto you. When you win the mini-game, you're free again. If you lose the mini-game, boost and get back into super-cruise and repeat until you eventually win.
- Always submit and boost away if you're interdicted on the way to the target system.
- 3A shields are necessary to protect you from the fire while you're getting away from interdictors.
- If you have a lone pirate interdict you on the final run to the station and you have shields, it's worth shooting him to get rid of him, but you always run the risk of Feds or more pirates turning up.
- If the Feds interdict you and then one or more pirates appear and start shooting you, you won't be followed into super-cruise. I guess because the Fed will want to deal with them.
- Sometimes, the Feds show in green on your radar, other times, they're the same colour as the other ships, in which case, use your contacts panel to see what they're doing. If they're present, but they haven't yet seen you, you can lose them by dropping out of SC, boost a bit and then back into SC. You should use your panel anyway at first because you won't know what colour they are. After many runs, more of the Feds will be green. It seems that the systems, which you deliver to, secretly like you when you smuggle slaves to them.
- occasionally, when exiting the station, there's a lone Fed travelling rather than patrolling, so he's further out, waiting for you to boost towards him. Check your radar before you boost out. If there's one out there, you need to turn in a different direction as soon as you exit.
The only things I'd do different to the Video is when exiting a station I'd line up with the slot then wait for it to be clear before exiting so that there's no risk of crashing into a ship on the way out. Often a whole lot of ships will exit, just when you're ready to go, like in the video at the station where he got a fine. You only have to wait about 30 seconds until it's clear. When entering the station, I prefer to line up about 7km out and then go in with a single boost, landing gear at 4.5km and full reverse at about 2km. Again, the shields are useful if you mess up and crash into the end of the station. Put 4 pips to shields before you hit.
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