Tactical solutions in Open Play
- Watch your scanner in supercruise, and avoid letting suspicious ships get behind you in the first place.
- In supercruise, overshoot target stations and double back for final approach. It makes it harder for hostiles to interdict you.
- Submit to interdictions, to avoid long FSD cooldown (for now - FD stated that this super-short cooldown will be revised, as it is not working out quite as intended)
- Hyperspace (star) jumps are not subject to mass disruption from large ships nearby. Set a course for another system if interdicted by larger ships, and bug out.
The supercruise scanner has a range of 40 seconds' travel time. By avoiding the obvious path through the system (arc up high above the orbital plane) you can stay out of sight of pirates, who are probably hovering near the sun, facing an attractive station, ready to throttle up and interdict incoming victims. If you can't see them, it's less likely that they can see you. But the easiest way to avoid them is to avoid the systems they are paying attention to. They cluster at the newbie start points (LHS 3447 and Eravate), the Old Worlds (Lave, Leesti etc) and active Community Goal systems. Other systems are no more dangerous than the start points, so there is no reason to hang around unless you want to prove something.
To interdict you, an attacker has to get behind and relatively close to you in Supercruise. Turn and fly head on at them if you see a hollow triangle trying to get behind you. If you can't shake them, consider dropping to normal space before they interdict you, and then hyperjumping elsewhere. This will deter opportunistic attackers, who will need to scan your wake and follow you to the different system.
Submitting means dropping your throttle to zero. When you do this you have FSD cooldown time + 16 seconds FSD hyperspace charge to avoid getting boiled Practise quickly opening the left UI nav panel and selecting a new system, so you can be ready to initiate jump as soon as the FSD is ready. Think of running from the Cylons in the first couple of episodes of the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot and it will be exciting.
Long-term Open Play solutions
- If you're subject to repeat player hostile attacks, change regions. Relocate 100-200 Light Years. Chances are, you won't see a soul.
- Make in-game friends, and fly with them. Build a support base of like-minded pilots.
Due to the way matchmaking works, the very fact of being in a Wing may prevent you being matched with another Wing - you can use this to avoid pirates. Also, if you Wing up and trade together, you all get a share of 5% of each others' profits, so it's worth doing. But be careful who you wing up with, as there are no penalties if you are attacked by a Wing member!