That's why I would like to add to the advice - heat sinks or silent running. I guess that will reduce aiming precision for projectile weapons.
That won't save from consequences of terrible build though.
"Ask the Gankers"
- Thread starter Dr Seuss
- Start date
That won't save from consequences of terrible build though.
Overt defenses
A stripped out powerplay hauler optimised for cargo capacity is the essentially same build as a greedy trader, and will be similar to a mission rather than survive-ability optimised vessel, and they are all guaranteed to see their rebuy screen. When I used to hunting powerplay fortifiers, I'd carry a mix of fixed and gimballed weapons, some loadouts I'd have gimballed lasers and fixed kinetic weapons - usually huge cannon under the nose of an FDL, others would fixed lasers and gimballed kinetics - usually multicannons. Reason for the split is lasers and rails shoot line of sight, where projectile weapons have a requirement to shoot ahead of the target, and its annoying to not be able to shoot both at the same time. This loadout gave me an advantage in that I could alphastrike, ie fire everything at once - and hit target, however it also brings with it a vulnerability to chaff, if the target popped chaff that would effectively deny me half of my weapons systems.
While I could detarget them to shoot gimballed weapons through their chaff cloud as though they were fixed, it requires me to be pointing the ship in a direction that only one weapons system will work. So for example if I start manually walking the multicannons onto the target ship, my lasers would be shooting across the targets bow completely ineffective on target, or if I focussed on using the fixed lasers, the multicannons are going to miss them by miles as the gimbal either dances like a python in a basket to a flute, or if I detarget the ship, they will shoot straight ahead and because of the ballistic arc, they will be raining down on the empty space behind my quarry.
So in summary, chaff can be a major inconvenience to SOME loadouts hostile players might be flying, and as such chaff is definitely worth a utility slot or two. Two chaff effectively allows perma-chaffing, just keep spamming chaff to annoy your enemy by making yourself harder to shoot at.
Another tip for surviving gankers, is donot faff about trying to low wake back to SC, highwake to another star system, reason being highwake is not affected by mass lock factor. If I pull you out of supercruise and you are flying a dropship, and I'm in python, my MLF is 17, yours is 14, if you try to low wake out of that encounter, due to my MLF I'm going to make it take 17*5=85 secs for you to charge your FSD, but if you highwake out the FSD only takes 15sec to charge, even if I were flying a cutter with 27 mass lock factor. And the bigger the ship pulling you over, the longer they can keep you there, the easier it is to kill you, so always always always highwake when retreating.
Flight assist off - some players, like me, fly with flight assist off all the time, it is harder to fly this way, but it is very rewarding and has a lot of advantages that warrant a conversation of their own. However for the victim of a ganker, even if they havent mastered the ways of the force and thus how to fly FAoff, while wriggling for their life trying to evade incoming weapons fire and charge their FSD to (hopefully high) wake out, toggling FAoff can help. With FA off for every input you give your ships flight controller, say vertical thrusters up, it will continue to keep doing that motion until you put a counter input in, ie vertical thrusters down. So for an example sequence of FAoff manouvers to make you a harder target for your ganker to hit, boost while using laterals and vertical thrusters and immediately hit flight assist off, you are now going to be travelling along a vector, its exact direction doesnt matter. You then, while still having flight assist off "steer your ship" (yaw pitch or roll or a combination of them all) , but because flight assist is off you are still going in the same direction in relation to space, even though your ship is now pointing a different direction. At that point re engage flight assist and boost, your ship is now travelling on a new vector, the direction you are pointing in, which could be at a large angle to the direction you were drifting a second ago. This plays havoc with any enemys attempts to garget you, especially with weapons such as plasmas where they need to shoot ahead of your ship to compensate for the travel time of their projectile. If you are now travelling 90° to the direction you were going when they released the shot, their shot could miss you by hundreds of meters of not a full click.
Stealthy defenses
If you lose your shields while trying to escape, dont panic about it, embrace it and repeatedly toggle silent running on and off. this will break the target lock your foe has on you. Only a couple of seconds silent running on, then back off for another couple of seconds, repeat makes you harder to hit. This is compounded if you are still twisting and evading, as you will appear on and disappear from their scanner as you toggle this on and off.
Heatsinks are a great use of a utility slot if trying to hide, pop a heatsink you get so cold you drop off their scanner. Go one better, go silent running and a heatsink when temp starts to get toasty, you will have thus been off their scanner for a while.
A stripped out powerplay hauler optimised for cargo capacity is the essentially same build as a greedy trader, and will be similar to a mission rather than survive-ability optimised vessel, and they are all guaranteed to see their rebuy screen. When I used to hunting powerplay fortifiers, I'd carry a mix of fixed and gimballed weapons, some loadouts I'd have gimballed lasers and fixed kinetic weapons - usually huge cannon under the nose of an FDL, others would fixed lasers and gimballed kinetics - usually multicannons. Reason for the split is lasers and rails shoot line of sight, where projectile weapons have a requirement to shoot ahead of the target, and its annoying to not be able to shoot both at the same time. This loadout gave me an advantage in that I could alphastrike, ie fire everything at once - and hit target, however it also brings with it a vulnerability to chaff, if the target popped chaff that would effectively deny me half of my weapons systems.
While I could detarget them to shoot gimballed weapons through their chaff cloud as though they were fixed, it requires me to be pointing the ship in a direction that only one weapons system will work. So for example if I start manually walking the multicannons onto the target ship, my lasers would be shooting across the targets bow completely ineffective on target, or if I focussed on using the fixed lasers, the multicannons are going to miss them by miles as the gimbal either dances like a python in a basket to a flute, or if I detarget the ship, they will shoot straight ahead and because of the ballistic arc, they will be raining down on the empty space behind my quarry.
So in summary, chaff can be a major inconvenience to SOME loadouts hostile players might be flying, and as such chaff is definitely worth a utility slot or two. Two chaff effectively allows perma-chaffing, just keep spamming chaff to annoy your enemy by making yourself harder to shoot at.
Another tip for surviving gankers, is donot faff about trying to low wake back to SC, highwake to another star system, reason being highwake is not affected by mass lock factor. If I pull you out of supercruise and you are flying a dropship, and I'm in python, my MLF is 17, yours is 14, if you try to low wake out of that encounter, due to my MLF I'm going to make it take 17*5=85 secs for you to charge your FSD, but if you highwake out the FSD only takes 15sec to charge, even if I were flying a cutter with 27 mass lock factor. And the bigger the ship pulling you over, the longer they can keep you there, the easier it is to kill you, so always always always highwake when retreating.
Flight assist off - some players, like me, fly with flight assist off all the time, it is harder to fly this way, but it is very rewarding and has a lot of advantages that warrant a conversation of their own. However for the victim of a ganker, even if they havent mastered the ways of the force and thus how to fly FAoff, while wriggling for their life trying to evade incoming weapons fire and charge their FSD to (hopefully high) wake out, toggling FAoff can help. With FA off for every input you give your ships flight controller, say vertical thrusters up, it will continue to keep doing that motion until you put a counter input in, ie vertical thrusters down. So for an example sequence of FAoff manouvers to make you a harder target for your ganker to hit, boost while using laterals and vertical thrusters and immediately hit flight assist off, you are now going to be travelling along a vector, its exact direction doesnt matter. You then, while still having flight assist off "steer your ship" (yaw pitch or roll or a combination of them all) , but because flight assist is off you are still going in the same direction in relation to space, even though your ship is now pointing a different direction. At that point re engage flight assist and boost, your ship is now travelling on a new vector, the direction you are pointing in, which could be at a large angle to the direction you were drifting a second ago. This plays havoc with any enemys attempts to garget you, especially with weapons such as plasmas where they need to shoot ahead of your ship to compensate for the travel time of their projectile. If you are now travelling 90° to the direction you were going when they released the shot, their shot could miss you by hundreds of meters of not a full click.
Stealthy defenses
If you lose your shields while trying to escape, dont panic about it, embrace it and repeatedly toggle silent running on and off. this will break the target lock your foe has on you. Only a couple of seconds silent running on, then back off for another couple of seconds, repeat makes you harder to hit. This is compounded if you are still twisting and evading, as you will appear on and disappear from their scanner as you toggle this on and off.
Heatsinks are a great use of a utility slot if trying to hide, pop a heatsink you get so cold you drop off their scanner. Go one better, go silent running and a heatsink when temp starts to get toasty, you will have thus been off their scanner for a while.
Hard Truth Time with Wargfoot (tm)
When it comes to gankers there really isn't anything that can be done. They're everywhere, they're flying better ships, they have the sort of lightning fast reflexes that would make Mr. Miyagi jealous - these are people that have taken the raw materials of the Elite Dangerous universe and crafted for themselves a horrific nightmare that they visit upon the innocent! The FDev developers would love to give us the tools to fight back but nothing works - most employees have quit in frustration - there were some protests but black vans full of riot gear wearing storm troopers carried them all away. There is no hope, no point, no purpose, no god, no sunny tomorrow as all is lost. I weep for everyone but mostly for myself. I'm sorry, this was hard to write.
When it comes to gankers there really isn't anything that can be done. They're everywhere, they're flying better ships, they have the sort of lightning fast reflexes that would make Mr. Miyagi jealous - these are people that have taken the raw materials of the Elite Dangerous universe and crafted for themselves a horrific nightmare that they visit upon the innocent! The FDev developers would love to give us the tools to fight back but nothing works - most employees have quit in frustration - there were some protests but black vans full of riot gear wearing storm troopers carried them all away. There is no hope, no point, no purpose, no god, no sunny tomorrow as all is lost. I weep for everyone but mostly for myself. I'm sorry, this was hard to write.
Seeing as no-one else is saying it - to survive gankers - "Git gud!"
Seriously though Wargfoot does have a kind of a point there, gankers tend to have honed every mechanic the game has to offer them into making their ship an uber killing machine, any sort of PVE build, as in cargo hauler, passenger liner, miner, etc... will be fundamentally compromised against such a machine. Gankers also tend to pick the fights they are almost certain to win, I've heard the term "seal clubbing" bandied about. Realisticallt the best potential outcome anyone being ganked can look to aim for, is making it out of the encounter without visiting the rebuy screen, for which there have been numerous tactics suggested, including that wall of text I posted earlier this afternoon. But even those tactics are coercing the player into "getting gud" - but getting good at escape and evasion rather than good at PvP.
Some guy blew me to pieces yesterday as I left the mail slot. I was so confused, thinking the Station was shooting at me. The whole encounter lasted maybe 5 seconds between exiting the slot and BOOM!
If you die within 5 seconds in a game where a 1v1 of two PvP ships takes in excess of 10 minutes, something with your build is severely flawed.
I know. I was in a fully A-rated MKIV. This event was extremely surprising. I’m not the best pilot or the most educated when it comes to game mechanics, but I have been here since the start. Whatever happened, it felt odd. It all happened so fast that I literally didn’t even have chance to hit boost, or even to glance at the radar.
Oh, i've got a question.
What is the best methods of extracting salty tears from the gankers?
I hear fast interdictor ships are one way. Interdict them over and over again, stopping them getting to the easy targets.
Any other suggestions?
What is the best methods of extracting salty tears from the gankers?
I hear fast interdictor ships are one way. Interdict them over and over again, stopping them getting to the easy targets.
Any other suggestions?
Simple. Git gud and beat thier rears.
Just pretend they are NPCs.
Fly a T6 and either dodge them in supercruise, or if interdicted escape multiple times. A lot of the poorer "gankers" run gimbals so a bit of chaff goes a long way.
Wasting their time is best.
Not always successful at this I'll be honest, but it's fun to try.
It's also good to hotkey contradictory and confusing comms to them e.g:-
"Hail Hydra"
"You know what they say about ppl with big ships"
"Your breath smells like wee wee"
"It's a trap"
etc etc
Equip a big interdictor and interdict their targets right under their noses. Then you can tell them to highwake.
Or become a ganker yourself, that's less targets for us !
Oooh, that's sly!
Not realistic. NPCs actually communicate.
Indecision kills squirrels!
1) Have a plan
2) Don't be sitting there thinking "what am i going to do?"
3) Be aware of your surroundings.
a) It this a PC or an NPC
B) Is is a Wing or a Solo Ship
C) Is it a Ganker or a Pirate (Why am I being interdicted?)
4) Know your ship and it's capabilities. (This is critical!)
A couple of good videos
Boost away
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woy8nmaVuVg
and
Turn Back
Git Gud Guide for Trading
(Please be aware this Video has some salty language.)
KriptoYeti
1) Have a plan
2) Don't be sitting there thinking "what am i going to do?"
3) Be aware of your surroundings.
a) It this a PC or an NPC
B) Is is a Wing or a Solo Ship
C) Is it a Ganker or a Pirate (Why am I being interdicted?)
4) Know your ship and it's capabilities. (This is critical!)
A couple of good videos
Boost away
and
Turn Back
Git Gud Guide for Trading
(Please be aware this Video has some salty language.)
KriptoYeti
Last edited by a moderator:
you can check the history tab just before you drop in the system to see who is in SC. you can stop at the star, and target CMDRs to see what ship and if they have stupid avatars (seems most gankers have these). You can emergency drop - will take them time then to drop on your low wake. You can high wake to another system, or self destruct to get a quick trip to the local station. Or you can engineer your ship well enough to survive multiple interdictions.... Or, if your assailants are really bad, even in a shieldless cutter, you can drop a heat sink and chaff immediately, and boost and turn immediately and low wake - the latter I've done in Nanomam many times and got away with 99% hull... cos Imps aren't the best assailants it seems... the 1% loss came from the drop to normal space. Once you get up to SC, emergency drop again immediately if you aren't in the mood for chain interdictions and high wake out, dock at a station in another system and order in a more suitable ship.
Don't run in a straight line. Don't fight the interdiction unless you know you will win it (maybe you are in a type 7 - they are king of the interdiction game).
Dont combat log. Its against the terms of service agreement.
Or tell a joke - they may let you go for being a good sport.
Don't run in a straight line. Don't fight the interdiction unless you know you will win it (maybe you are in a type 7 - they are king of the interdiction game).
Dont combat log. Its against the terms of service agreement.
Or tell a joke - they may let you go for being a good sport.