This was including the idea that you would be using forward and reverse thrust as well. My throttle setting may be there, but it's only on turning that my speed would be. I'm also simplying.
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Newcomer / Intro How do people kill pirates so quickly?
- Thread starter Marvin the Martian
- Start date
From what I can see from your video, there are several things that are slowing you down in a fight.
1) Maneuverability. You appear to be flying in straight lines at your target and only turning after they've come about on you, and you're turning slowly to bring them back into view. It looks like you're not really using lateral thrusters to push your ship around in addition to your pitching. Remember, you're flying a spaceship, not an aircraft, so by thrusting vertically or laterally as you pitch you can shorten your turning circle much more. This is helped even further by maintaining your throttle close to the blue zone, as others have described. Adding a boost to this can also increase your turning speed even further, allowing you to stay on target far more often. Turning flight assist off during such turns can also allow you to spin around quicker too, but that's a bit more advanced. Also don't be afraid to fly entirely backwards for a while if your target starts trying to "joust" you. If you fly backwards and thrust up or down whilst pitching you can actually maintain the same distance from an enemy even as they fly towards you, allowing you continue to lands shots for longer.
2) Crosshairs. Watch where your crosshairs are moving across the viewscreen, especially a the start of the fight, where they were creeping up to the top left as you barreled straight at your target. These can be a good indicator of where your target is going to be, and how fast they are moving. Don't fly at your targets current position, fly more towards your crosshairs, this will shorten the distance between you both and allow you to better estimate where they enemy is going next. If you're close enough (and you should be) you can also watch your enemies engine thrust to see which way they are moving, and whether they're boosting, giving you more time to react accordingly.
3) PIPs. You didn't alter your PIP settings the entire fight. This is huge. With only 2 charges in PIPs as you spend several seconds raking a target, you're going to drain your capacitor faster and thus run out of energy quicker, which means less time firing which means lower dps. More PIPs in shields increases shield regen rate and more in engines means an increase to top speed and more boosts. Get used to switching between different configurations on the fly as the situation calls for it.
4) Sub-system targeting. Once you target an enemy, don't just fly at them and start shooting. First, cycle through their sub-systems (bind a couple of keys somewhere to allow you to do this comfortably). By not targeting sub-systems, all your damage first goes to their shields, then to their hull and armor, then to any sub-systems you happen to hit. But if you target say, their engines first, or better yet, their power plant, you can start targeting those areas first. You still need to position yourself to actually be able to see those points, so start learning where different ships power plants are so you can also tell which way you want to be rolling and maneuvering to properly line up on those areas. Generally you always want to be targeting powerplants, as you can kill a powerplant before taking out a ships armor, and if the powerplant goes, the whole ship dies regardless of anything else it has left. Sometimes a target can die with 20% hull left if you can kill its power first.
5) Get closer. I know the temptation is to open fire as soon as the target is in range, but sometimes it can be easier to fly up close to an enemy who is not currently hostile to you. Target his power plant and position yourself behind him as you match your speed. Put all PIPs to weapons and then let him have it. Chances are good that by the time he starts reacting and tries to turn on you, you can already have him half dead and you can easily turn with him, as you continue to land shot after shot into his vulnerable power plant. You can turn a several minutes long fight into a few seconds slaughter if you get good at it. And getting close is just good anyway, depending on weapon loadout. Certain things have damage falloff over range, so make sure you're firing at optimal distance.
Other than that, generally engineering more of your ship for more dps and more charge in your distributor will help. Add a corrosive mod to one of your multicannons (just one though, multiple don't stack). This will reduce the armor hardness of your target and increase any damage it takes, by as much as 20%. Further increases to your dirty drags will provide more maneuverability. Continue to up the levels of your weapons and squeeze more dps out of every gun.
There's a lot to combat and it takes a long time to get extremely good at it. Having a better ship with more upgraded modules certainly helps, but managing PIPs, mastering lateral thrust and speed changes, toggling FA on/off and cycling sub-systems are all massive parts that take time to get good with.
1) Maneuverability. You appear to be flying in straight lines at your target and only turning after they've come about on you, and you're turning slowly to bring them back into view. It looks like you're not really using lateral thrusters to push your ship around in addition to your pitching. Remember, you're flying a spaceship, not an aircraft, so by thrusting vertically or laterally as you pitch you can shorten your turning circle much more. This is helped even further by maintaining your throttle close to the blue zone, as others have described. Adding a boost to this can also increase your turning speed even further, allowing you to stay on target far more often. Turning flight assist off during such turns can also allow you to spin around quicker too, but that's a bit more advanced. Also don't be afraid to fly entirely backwards for a while if your target starts trying to "joust" you. If you fly backwards and thrust up or down whilst pitching you can actually maintain the same distance from an enemy even as they fly towards you, allowing you continue to lands shots for longer.
2) Crosshairs. Watch where your crosshairs are moving across the viewscreen, especially a the start of the fight, where they were creeping up to the top left as you barreled straight at your target. These can be a good indicator of where your target is going to be, and how fast they are moving. Don't fly at your targets current position, fly more towards your crosshairs, this will shorten the distance between you both and allow you to better estimate where they enemy is going next. If you're close enough (and you should be) you can also watch your enemies engine thrust to see which way they are moving, and whether they're boosting, giving you more time to react accordingly.
3) PIPs. You didn't alter your PIP settings the entire fight. This is huge. With only 2 charges in PIPs as you spend several seconds raking a target, you're going to drain your capacitor faster and thus run out of energy quicker, which means less time firing which means lower dps. More PIPs in shields increases shield regen rate and more in engines means an increase to top speed and more boosts. Get used to switching between different configurations on the fly as the situation calls for it.
4) Sub-system targeting. Once you target an enemy, don't just fly at them and start shooting. First, cycle through their sub-systems (bind a couple of keys somewhere to allow you to do this comfortably). By not targeting sub-systems, all your damage first goes to their shields, then to their hull and armor, then to any sub-systems you happen to hit. But if you target say, their engines first, or better yet, their power plant, you can start targeting those areas first. You still need to position yourself to actually be able to see those points, so start learning where different ships power plants are so you can also tell which way you want to be rolling and maneuvering to properly line up on those areas. Generally you always want to be targeting powerplants, as you can kill a powerplant before taking out a ships armor, and if the powerplant goes, the whole ship dies regardless of anything else it has left. Sometimes a target can die with 20% hull left if you can kill its power first.
5) Get closer. I know the temptation is to open fire as soon as the target is in range, but sometimes it can be easier to fly up close to an enemy who is not currently hostile to you. Target his power plant and position yourself behind him as you match your speed. Put all PIPs to weapons and then let him have it. Chances are good that by the time he starts reacting and tries to turn on you, you can already have him half dead and you can easily turn with him, as you continue to land shot after shot into his vulnerable power plant. You can turn a several minutes long fight into a few seconds slaughter if you get good at it. And getting close is just good anyway, depending on weapon loadout. Certain things have damage falloff over range, so make sure you're firing at optimal distance.
Other than that, generally engineering more of your ship for more dps and more charge in your distributor will help. Add a corrosive mod to one of your multicannons (just one though, multiple don't stack). This will reduce the armor hardness of your target and increase any damage it takes, by as much as 20%. Further increases to your dirty drags will provide more maneuverability. Continue to up the levels of your weapons and squeeze more dps out of every gun.
There's a lot to combat and it takes a long time to get extremely good at it. Having a better ship with more upgraded modules certainly helps, but managing PIPs, mastering lateral thrust and speed changes, toggling FA on/off and cycling sub-systems are all massive parts that take time to get good with.
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I think you’ve got a lot of good suggestions here, so I’ll chime in with more of an encouragement. That wasn’t half bad.
You didn’t lose your shield and you destroyed a relatively high ranked medium ship. It certainly wasn’t slow either, even though it may feel like it when comparing to folks with a lot of time in the game and heavily optimized/engineered setups.
You didn’t lose your shield and you destroyed a relatively high ranked medium ship. It certainly wasn’t slow either, even though it may feel like it when comparing to folks with a lot of time in the game and heavily optimized/engineered setups.
Frags. The answer to every "how do I kill ships faster?" question is frags. Frags are love. Frags are life. Frags have the highest alpha damage in the game. 5 frags on a Krait Mk. II can take down the shields on a competent Anaconda in one pass and destroy the ship on the second.
Engineered frags turn a Krait Mk. II into an absolute beast of a killing machine.
The only issue I can see is that large frags are still broken in Horizons - they won't deploy in that mode.
Engineered frags turn a Krait Mk. II into an absolute beast of a killing machine.
The only issue I can see is that large frags are still broken in Horizons - they won't deploy in that mode.
This is it exactly; I mentioned as much earlier but apparently it needed saying again. For various reasons I estimate approximately double the destruction rate using a Mamba rather than a Krait 2, though with Fragment Cannons either of those are far, far beyond almost any other approach.
I am also still watching the status of Fragment Cannons in Horizons, and had considered attempting to calm those eager warriors into eyeing the imminent Update 12 as the opportunity, though without anything meaningful to contribute now I decided against it until tomorrow.
My craziest ship build is a T-10 packed with purely incendiary frags. It's like one of those big fish, just patiently waiting for someone stupid enough to come up close. Then it opens the mouth and sucks in the prey. They normally blow up before they can leave, but if they manage to escape, then you are sort of up the creek.
Much better is my frag Vulture. I use rapid fire, screening shell, which is like the pump gun of frags. On a Vulture it's probably the most fun you can have in the game. I used to go to the shards for mats so that I could synth ammo. Nerfed.
Can't you go in Horizons?
Brevity is an important skill in writing - it took you so long to get to the point that I stopped reading.
My point was condensed within my six starting syllables—beyond those lie progressively-finer details designed directly for the varying interests of varying minds to abbreviate appropriately. From your hypothesis, it is well that words in this verbose vicinity are ineligible for ingress, for the difference between polite society and peasantry is to bemoan it.
Your six starting syllables are insufficient to convey any meaning.
Your "progressively-finer details" (quick note: the hyphen is unnecessary) are exactly the kind of verbosity I was pointing to - it's indicative of someone trying very hard to appear smart without actually understanding that the best way to appear smart is to be so.
No, you had to read beyond six syllables and follow a link to reach that.
Rather:
Said earlier post was a two-part response to an original post which contained two different questions, whereas my response to yours was in agreement.
There are other ways to kill ships faster. The quickest way to kill ships is to choose easier targets. Isee some people showing vids of how quickly they can kill an Anaconda that's Master rank, then I wonder how that compares with an Elite or Harmless one. I can kill a Competent one with burst lasers quicker that you can kill an Elite one with frags.
Fragment Cannons can destroy a Competent Anaconda quicker still, though. Fragment Cannons destroy targets so quickly that the matter of their actual damage becomes secondary to reducing your time between kills in other ways, such as becoming faster at moving, turning and targeting.
A critical moment for me was questioning the purpose of ever carrying a Rail Gun with Feedback Cascade when almost no shields survive a stab and a Fragment Cannon volley.
Yes, but then I could beat you by choosing a harmless one.The point I'm making is that target selection has more influence on the speed to kill than weapon choice.
By the time you get to harmless ships, you don't want to kill them at max speed because they'll die before your scan completes, then the kill doesn't count for anything. They don't count as mission kills, nor do you get any bounty unless all the ship's details appear in your HUD, which happens either after you complete a basic scan or they land a shot on you.
OP was asking how people kill so quickly. First, OP should look at what's being killed before deciding on their own inadequacy. The next thing is whether OP wants the fastest long-term kill rate, say ranking or massacre missions, or fastest single kill, because the fastest long-term kill rate comes from weapons that don't require ammo as I can testify by killing 22,103 ships since 1st May. That's an average of 500 a night if iI played every night. How many can you kill in a night with your frags? Try it!
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Pacifiers take frag cannons to a whole new level. Now your able to target em not only close up...but as they flee, out of range of their lesser siblings frag cannons.
But for me it's rails... yeah l know their nerfed and yada yada.
But omg such fun.
My fdl railer is deadly.
4 short range g5 super pen rails delivering about 1200dps per volley at close (800m to1km) range.
But it's that huge gimballed rapid firing corrosive multicannon that's ceaselessly blatting away, that really nails em.
If only we had a turreted one...omg that would be fun.
But for me it's rails... yeah l know their nerfed and yada yada.
But omg such fun.
My fdl railer is deadly.
4 short range g5 super pen rails delivering about 1200dps per volley at close (800m to1km) range.
But it's that huge gimballed rapid firing corrosive multicannon that's ceaselessly blatting away, that really nails em.
If only we had a turreted one...omg that would be fun.
I suspect it's not really the rails but
I would suggest that the FdL/Mamba are not the highest effective DPS ships in the game, and that it is actually the Krait Mk. II.
DPS "per volley" is not DPS - damage per second is an absolute value.
A turreted huge multicannon would be underwhelming, even outright boring.
Rails feel great, but you're Dragsham, not Maverick, and you'll miss. Even if you don't, gimballed frags - unmodified at that - will dump damage on a target far more quickly than rails ever can. I too would like to see large rails (perhaps as a turreted option for multicrew), but the maths says "no" to rails as an absolute DPS weapon. This explains why the special of choice is feedback cascade - you use rails to keep shields low after an alpha strike, if you can, and prevent them regenerating if you don't knock them out on the first pass (with frags).
Not only is the Krait Mk. II more manoeuvrable overall than either of the Zorgon-Peterson ships (boost stall, and how that really punishes the slightest mistake, is not an issue with the Krait Mk. II), but the 2x C2 and 3x C3 hardpoints allow for an all-gimballed frag build that, when engineered, just turns the trigger into a PvE "I win" button.
Frags are love. Frags are life. If you deny frags, you will spend the afterlife in Hell; the special place reserved for those that don't get the basic maths. If you put a C3 frag cannon in the C4 slot on your Zorgon-Peterson ships, you're just not using them right.
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Choosing easier targets means the frags kill them even quicker.
I don't really see where you're going with this - the competent Anaconda definitely would die vs. frags before you even got its shields down with burst lasers. It's basic maths.
I do not intend to troll you, but I am now thinking of the "do you even lift!?" meme.
Use your Landing Gear to limit the unwanted speed from a boost, while retaining the acceleration and rotation, and leaving your speed in the blue zone at the end (after retracting). This powerful interaction makes the starship boost acceleration factor, an unlisted number, contribute directly to agility in a way which elevates the total usefulness of the Mamba beyond anything else.
Obviously it defies description due to that lack of numbers, but I have made several videos of it:
Grapple 1 and Grapple 2 each also involve a good example of using a Landing Gear boost to hook back around towards a target with controlled speed.
This Exsection was to show Fragment Cannons versus Power Plant, but also happens to include a good example of a Landing Gear boost to keep the Beam Laser going.
Watch the Info panel carefully to see when I deployed and retracted the Landing Gear.
The reason it is not an issue with the Krait 2 is that the Krait 2 boost is pathetic, unable even to reverse its direction from full speed.
About point 4. Targetting subsystems is a great idea, but keep an eye on the damage of the subsystem. Once it's completely damaged yer wasting yer time hitting scrap metal. Shift over to another subsystem
Powerplant is a good target, but I'd suggest going for the frameshift drive first. It'll stop yer pirate jumping to safety