Newcomer / Intro Engineer Experimental Effect - 'Scramble Spectrum'

[jpjeffrey]

Engineer Broo Tarquin upgrades Pulse lasers to level 4 - and, if you're lucky on the RNG casino wheel (or willing to spend 2 favours), you can get an Experimental Effect known as 'Scramble Spectrum'.

This claims to have the chance of causing 'random malfunctions' on a target ship.

Q. During battle, is it possible to know when such a malfunction has occurred on the enemy ship? and, if so, what particular malfunction has occurred...?

 

[Chris Simon]

There are some icons, that tell you what's going on with enemy (or your own) ship that appear under the ship hologram:

Spoiler

Other than that, you just have to guess. Weapon or engine malfunctions are pretty easily spotted.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I have two scramble spectrum pulses on one of my Vultures. I'm quite often seeing NPC ships losing some functions, though the effect doesn't appear to last for long. It usually just shows as the malfunction icon. The most frequent effect is cargo dropping when the cargo hatch malfunctions. This can be handy, as I'm able to pirate without using hatch breakers.

 

[jpjeffrey]

Thanks guys
I knew about the icons, but I just thought it'd be nice to see a message flash up in the right hand info panel 'Spectrum update - Thrusters failed on target!' (or suchlike)
(= code for 'That shiny new Doo-Dah that you grinded away for is working OK!')

Mebbe it's just me.......

 

[Chris Simon]

Well, you can tell their drives malfunctioned if they've stopped maneuvering and are plummeting through space in uncontrolled manner.
Also shiny stuff stops flying out of their thrusters.

Seriously, though, yes, that would be nice. I think you can kind of tell which modules are offline from the look of the Subtargets tab, though it's not exactly user friendly method.