Just tried this on a couple Elite Private Couriers and MAN this is tough. Was making some progress on the 2nd one, whittling down his drives and point defences, when a bounty hunter Chieftan or something dropped in and ruined my fun...couldn't withstand both of their fire with my depleted supplies and had to split!
One for the Pirates....
- Thread starter Ory'Hara
- Start date
Best to rely on disabling weaponry for additional enemies
and leave them for the S&R team, while dodging police going cold.
I tested some private courier heists, they spawn frequently in investment state,
though being elite they do not repair their drives, but STILL they bug out!!!
when you are raiding as a wing, with their modules being at 0% but operational.
Deleted member 115407
D
Yeah, that was bunk.
Drives 0%
Plant 0%
Point Defense 0%
Still shooting, flying, and shooting down hatchbreakers.
We should have by that time cracked that NPC wide open.
Unfortunately this is the only viable method, and it makes no sense. If these recent updates are any indication with all the core gameplay improvements, we CAN do better.
The piracy community was hoping we’d get some love in Beyond but it didn’t happen (well, not directly anyway).
We NEED a way to bring disabled (drives < 2%) NPCs and CMDRs to a full stop, without having to risk their distruction by attempting to shoot out their PP, which doesn’t always work. Some ideas I’ve heard or had:
1. Grappling Hook
Simple, dirty, and very Piratey.
This would be a physical implement that would involve skill in matching speed and minding cable tension (tension meter mini game) to manually bring a target to a stop.
2. Tractor Beam
Similar but more futuristic method. So far we haven’t seen these in the game at all though (that I can think of) so the lore may not support it.
This would mean that it would only work on targets with low to zero acceleration to overcome inertia and slow a disabled ship to a stop. This would also be useful for corralling drifting cargo that was ‘streamed’ out in a line. It would have no effect on a target under main engine/thruster power.
Edit: we have seen it. Both the Thargoid and Guardians have Tractor Tech. The lore would be simply that we didn’t have it in game until now because we just figured out how to adapt it!
3. ‘Inertial Dampening Boot’ Limpet
We need that Universal Limpet controller! Or at least make this a function of the Hatch Breaker limpet controller.
This would be a limpet that attaches itself to the hull of a 0% drive ship and slows it to a stop. Problem solved and very simple.
4. Real Space FSD Interdictor Tether
This was/is Code CMDR J.J. Musclethorpe’s idea and it might be the best one. It uses something we all already have, and in game lore and physics.
CMDR with < 2% Drives? Fire the FSD Interdictor in ‘Real Space’ mode to establish a frame shift tether, decelerate or reverse your own ship, and quickly bring the disabled ship to a full stop.
Frontier, you guys have been doing an amazing job lately, and PvP AND PvE piracy have been made much better and for the first time in years as they are actually profitable again.
However we are missing this one piece of the puzzle, and until we have it, the game mechanics for all forms of piracy are going to be limited and incomplete.
Please consider implementing something along these lines! Thanks!!!
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Nice sum up of ideas!
Add this to them:
Magnetic field mine experimental
Upon detonation this mine will apply a magnetic field towards the position of its debris,
that acts like gravitation, even if the mine was not triggered by proximity but timed out.
Ships or objects in the magnetic field will be drawn towards the center of the effect
and stopped there.
The effect persists for a while and enables new tactics on combat, along with
drawing spilled cargo into an are concentrating loot and thus speeding up recovery of commodities.
Add this to them:
Magnetic field mine experimental
Upon detonation this mine will apply a magnetic field towards the position of its debris,
that acts like gravitation, even if the mine was not triggered by proximity but timed out.
Ships or objects in the magnetic field will be drawn towards the center of the effect
and stopped there.
The effect persists for a while and enables new tactics on combat, along with
drawing spilled cargo into an are concentrating loot and thus speeding up recovery of commodities.
This would be awesome but we wouldn’t need it if we had the Tractor Beam. I also I feel like I’ve seen something like this recently in another game but I can’t remember or put my finger on it...
I was able to finally get some valuable loot off an elite Private Courier yesterday, from a T9. Only problem was that I was only able to get a little bit off him because I accidentally killed the drives all the way first before the ion mine, so he was drifting, and apparently the ion mines do not bring a dead-thruster drifting ship to a halt. Which allllmost makes sense. Kind of. But they're so hard to use when the ship is still flying around without hitting yourself with the mine simultaneously.
I haven't had any problem with them still firing point defences after I took them out though, 0% on their PD's has worked for me. But hatch breakers still have a hell of a time latching onto a ship that's spinning even the slightest bit, maybe 1 in 10 actually connects.
Another thing is that wayyy more Private Couriers were spawning in Agriculture Boom systems than normal freighters (esp. high value refinery freighters), and obviously those are a lot more difficult to take down due to their Elite level. Compounded by the fact that for some reason, Private Couriers seem to fly around in normal space for about 5 minutes after interdiction before deciding to high wake out, which makes the "interdict in secure system and follow to anarchy system" method a huge pain in the . Compared to normal freighters, which seem to high wake it out within a minute or so.
I'd loooooove some sort of grappling hook method, and seems like the real-space interdiction tether would be almost the same as that anyway. So piratey.
I'd also love a ship-to-ship docking method, where if you got close enough you could have some docking clamps that could literally grab the other ship and you could use thrusters to drag it to a halt, and you could sustain some hull integrity damage too to make it more interesting.
I haven't had any problem with them still firing point defences after I took them out though, 0% on their PD's has worked for me. But hatch breakers still have a hell of a time latching onto a ship that's spinning even the slightest bit, maybe 1 in 10 actually connects.
Another thing is that wayyy more Private Couriers were spawning in Agriculture Boom systems than normal freighters (esp. high value refinery freighters), and obviously those are a lot more difficult to take down due to their Elite level. Compounded by the fact that for some reason, Private Couriers seem to fly around in normal space for about 5 minutes after interdiction before deciding to high wake out, which makes the "interdict in secure system and follow to anarchy system" method a huge pain in the . Compared to normal freighters, which seem to high wake it out within a minute or so.
I'd loooooove some sort of grappling hook method, and seems like the real-space interdiction tether would be almost the same as that anyway. So piratey.
I'd also love a ship-to-ship docking method, where if you got close enough you could have some docking clamps that could literally grab the other ship and you could use thrusters to drag it to a halt, and you could sustain some hull integrity damage too to make it more interesting.
Now that you have learned the use and limit of ion mining,
you might want to look into the backup tactic of
"gracefully stopping a prize with dead drives" via "ship-blocking".
Basically you need to use your ship as a stopping block,
your shape as a stabilizer for the target to counter his rotation.
Flat ships are better for this.
Fly slightly below but in the same direction as the target is trundling,
speed past it in fa
ff, turn around and position you in the way.Then slowly decelerat to gracefully, with as small damage as possible,
stop the target and make it touch your ship, slowly pushing it back.
Be careful, larger ships with bigger hullmass are harder to decelerate.
Vid for visual clarification(it is really hard to learn):
[video=youtube;n5roNWhi21k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5roNWhi21k[/video]
Sidenote:
Investment state is great for courier NPCs with valuable loot,
but LTD piracy is way more credit effective.
Sidenote 2:
Ion mine effect does only work on engines that are operational
and FA: on.
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My god this is infuriating. Zero success with Ion Mines after several attempts. Seems impossible to hit a ship with them without hitting yourself simultaneously. Thought maybe if I got their drives down low enough that the ion mine finished them off it would work, but no, even if the ion mine hit takes their drives to 0% they keep drifting. I guess because their drives can't reboot if the hit knocks them out? Ugh
Maybe if I can somehow get to where i'm flying backwards in front of them and let the mine drift back at them? Doesn't seem likely.
Maybe if I can somehow get to where i'm flying backwards in front of them and let the mine drift back at them? Doesn't seem likely.
Can confirm pirate queens are where it's at, my friend.
You know me so well X
Finally a success! Caught a T9 in my Python today, got his drives pretty low with seekers, then was able to lay some mines around him ducking in and out and got him to hit one without hitting myself, then whipped around and hit him with a combined fire group of seekers plus super penetrator dumbfire missiles, which I realized I could use to compensate for not having time before drive reboot to always get the necessary angle/target lock for the seekers to have full impact, by cutting through the hull to the drives from other angles. I tried switching entirely to dumbfire penetrators instead of seekers initially, but the lack of drag effect and the higher hull damage compared to module damage made them an impractical substitute. But the combination works to give yourself that extra margin of error to get those last hits on the drives. Even when I pulled it off, he was still drifting a tiny bit, but only at about 10 clicks (whatevers per whatever?), so I was able to match speed and fill my holds without blowing up the diamonds.
I also switched to shock mines instead of regular mines to reduce total hull damage, but I have noticed a couple times that the ion disruptor doesn't necessarily bring the target to a halt, sometimes they keep drifting at high speeds, or in this last case at least at a low speed. I'm not sure if that's a result of the directional impact of the shock mines, or if it was happening before in my attempts with normal mines too.
It's pretty annoying having to sacrifice 3 hardpoints to be able to pull it off, just means I have to run from pretty much any other fight.
I also switched to shock mines instead of regular mines to reduce total hull damage, but I have noticed a couple times that the ion disruptor doesn't necessarily bring the target to a halt, sometimes they keep drifting at high speeds, or in this last case at least at a low speed. I'm not sure if that's a result of the directional impact of the shock mines, or if it was happening before in my attempts with normal mines too.
It's pretty annoying having to sacrifice 3 hardpoints to be able to pull it off, just means I have to run from pretty much any other fight.
The shockmines are what makes them drift also weapons with any type of impact. The ship will keep the speed it had when engines went out. So far to my knowledge only explosives do not apply momentum excluding shock mines.
It is tricky, but easy is not that rewarding.
You need to hit the drives prior with draghounds and then zoom past the target for mines in FA off, using directional thrust to swing around at 600m distance with the drives locked for the best result.
It even works with torps, is a lot trickier though.
It is tricky, but easy is not that rewarding.
You need to hit the drives prior with draghounds and then zoom past the target for mines in FA off, using directional thrust to swing around at 600m distance with the drives locked for the best result.
It even works with torps, is a lot trickier though.
Yaaaarrrr!
See? Told you Pirates are the greatest pilots.
And just think, you could be earning billions shooting stationary rocks!
The biggest issue we have on XB1 right now is the broken chat-box (any time we try to COMM with CMDR "clients" the game take us on the XBOX keyboard application screen, which requires 10 seconds to load and doesn't allow us to see what happens on game screen).
Apart from all the proposals from fancy tools (me like some of them) I'd really love to have some pre-loaded text [I know this may be quite a minor issue for PC players] which we can use for piracy. I mean, like we have the WINGMAN ORDER menu under the control menu, it would be really good to have something similar for other types of COMMs like WING ("attack my target" "help me!" "watch your six" etc.), GENERAL (for greetings and so on), BOUNTY HUNTER ("stop for KWS scan" "I'll send you in jail" etc), DISTRESS ("need fuel" "need repair" "need protection" etc) and of course PIRACY ("stop and submit for scan" "yarrr gimme x tons of cargo" "walk the plank!" etc).
All of those pre-loaded text boxes trigger certain NPC behaviour (when texted to NPCs) and are of course very useful for player interaction [even more if a degree of customization is being allowed] >>> in particular for console players who are living on the fortune to see another player in open outside CGs.
Apart from all the proposals from fancy tools (me like some of them) I'd really love to have some pre-loaded text [I know this may be quite a minor issue for PC players] which we can use for piracy. I mean, like we have the WINGMAN ORDER menu under the control menu, it would be really good to have something similar for other types of COMMs like WING ("attack my target" "help me!" "watch your six" etc.), GENERAL (for greetings and so on), BOUNTY HUNTER ("stop for KWS scan" "I'll send you in jail" etc), DISTRESS ("need fuel" "need repair" "need protection" etc) and of course PIRACY ("stop and submit for scan" "yarrr gimme x tons of cargo" "walk the plank!" etc).
All of those pre-loaded text boxes trigger certain NPC behaviour (when texted to NPCs) and are of course very useful for player interaction [even more if a degree of customization is being allowed] >>> in particular for console players who are living on the fortune to see another player in open outside CGs.