I Shot a Cop...guess what happened!!!!

hems303 · Jul 22, 2015

Hi All

Well it sometimes happens....that dozy cop wanders across your burning laser in an RES melee!
Yup..it happened last night, to me in LFT 90.... I thought "!! Fine...bounty...inconvenience.. the whole nine yards!!!"
But...... no .... what????
In bright red letters came the comment from said scorched cop.........
"I hope that is not what you intended Commander!"
That was it!! Nothing else! YAY!!! FD have finally seen sense on the friendly cop/navy accidental single shot nastiness!

Anyone else seen this?, as I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere.

Sysmon · Jul 22, 2015

Grats, yes I have seen that too. I sometimes wonder how long those people that end up with bounties hold down their triggers AFTER the victim wanders into the line of fire...

S

Kryso · Jul 22, 2015

Sysmon said:
Grats, yes I have seen that too. I sometimes wonder how long those people that end up with bounties hold down their triggers AFTER the victim wanders into the line of fire...

S

Only time I accidentally hit a cop was with a class 4 PA, so I don't think he'd've been happy either way ;D I always tell people situational awareness is something that helps greatly with avoiding friendly fire.

Yomamas Fett · Jul 22, 2015

Killed a cop in Ugrivirii High RES a couple of weeks back, charging Rails on target, Cop Eagle moves across LoF, move to avoid, Eagle follows my reticule...splat. Of course I should have aborted the salvo...live and learn I suppose.

DNYI · Jul 22, 2015

I think what happened is you were under the friendly fire damage limit before a bounty is issued. Even though FD has recently made the limit more generous, one can easily do more damage than the allowance in a single shot (i.e. single pull of trigger, all weapons fire once and only once) with multiple weapon fire groups and damaging enough weapons. Two Large (Class 3) pulse lasers firing once is more than enough to surpass the damage allowance at times. Although I have noticed that there seems to be a larger friendly fire allowance in conflict zones while aligned to one of the factions fighting in it than there seems to be outside of conflict zones. And by conflict zones I mean the high and low intensity nav points for civil war, wars, protests, resistance, etc.

Zomb Lee · Jul 22, 2015

Other than perhaps your weapons exceeding the max amount of allowable "friendly damage", does your reputation with the local security forces help in this matter? You see, I have chosen to remain completely unaligned with absolutely everyone. My reputation does not dip below neutral anywhere I am in the galaxy. So does this mean if a cop wanders through my stream of fire, does the damage limit still apply to me, or will I instantly get a bounty on me because of my neutral rep as it was in older patches?

DNYI · Jul 22, 2015

Zomb Lee said:
Other than perhaps your weapons exceeding the max amount of allowable "friendly damage", does your reputation with the local security forces help in this matter? You see, I have chosen to remain completely unaligned with absolutely everyone. My reputation does not dip below neutral anywhere I am in the galaxy. So does this mean if a cop wanders through my stream of fire, does the damage limit still apply to me, or will I instantly get a bounty on me because of my neutral rep as it was in older patches?

I believe you will instantly get a bounty, as you are not firing on friends, but people neutral to you. Your rep with factions does help in this matter as well as friendly/allied rep will decrease the frequency the authority does wanted/cargo scans (provided you did not fly in front of them too long), increase amount of available missions (fewer will be unavailable due to lack of rep), decreases the frequency of authority interdictions (unless there is lockdown/war/civil war state), provides access to major faction specific ships (through naval rank missions that occur as reputation increases), and it might increase the speed at which police will arrive when crimes are committed against you. Currently, there is no disadvantages to having positive reputation, but there are disadvantages to having negative reputation.

Spanksh · Jul 22, 2015

Kryso said:
Only time I accidentally hit a cop was with a class 4 PA, so I don't think he'd've been happy either way ;D I always tell people situational awareness is something that helps greatly with avoiding friendly fire.

Sadly "situational awareness" is useless when a cop unexpectedly flies into your line of fire from outside your view with like 300m/s. It's only possible to avoid if he is fairly far away. 10 out of 10 times, when I get a friendly fire bounty, it's because there suddenly is a cop up in my face. Even single shots from 3 large lasers pretty much always go way over the friendly fire threshold.

crashland · Jul 22, 2015

I had a cop fly through my turreted lasers while I was chasing down a wanted NPC and I got a 'Hey! Watch what you're doing with those lasers' message. I suspect I would have got a different message if his shields had been down though.

babelfisch · Jul 22, 2015

Spanksh said:
Sadly "situational awareness" is useless when a cop unexpectedly flies into your line of fire from outside your view with like 300m/s. It's only possible to avoid if he is fairly far away. 10 out of 10 times, when I get a friendly fire bounty, it's because there suddenly is a cop up in my face. Even single shots from 3 large lasers pretty much always go way over the friendly fire threshold.

And still there are people who don't have FF accidents. Call me lucky, but I didn't hit a friendly ship since January.

CakeEngine · Jul 22, 2015

Spanksh said:
Sadly "situational awareness" is useless when a cop unexpectedly flies into your line of fire [...]

If you are aware of your surroundings and situation, there is no "unexpected", because you are aware of it. ;D

Marra Morgan · Jul 22, 2015

Spanksh said:
Sadly "situational awareness" is useless when a cop unexpectedly flies into your line of fire from outside your view with like 300m/s. It's only possible to avoid if he is fairly far away. 10 out of 10 times, when I get a friendly fire bounty, it's because there suddenly is a cop up in my face.

If you're keeping tabs on the scanner, nothing is unexpected.

ocflyer · Jul 22, 2015

DNYI said:
I think what happened is you were under the friendly fire damage limit before a bounty is issued. Even though FD has recently made the limit more generous, one can easily do more damage than the allowance in a single shot (i.e. single pull of trigger, all weapons fire once and only once) with multiple weapon fire groups and damaging enough weapons. Two Large (Class 3) pulse lasers firing once is more than enough to surpass the damage allowance at times. Although I have noticed that there seems to be a larger friendly fire allowance in conflict zones while aligned to one of the factions fighting in it than there seems to be outside of conflict zones. And by conflict zones I mean the high and low intensity nav points for civil war, wars, protests, resistance, etc.

I got a chuckle out of your comment because it got me thinking about my pair of C3 beam lasers. I pull the trigger only one time and let go when the capacitor is empty. That's enough to take a Sidewinder or Eagle from 100% shields to 0% hull within seconds. So, I'm guessing that my one time is more than the allowance, do you think?

Janichsan · Jul 22, 2015

Spanksh said:
Sadly "situational awareness" is useless when a cop unexpectedly flies into your line of fire from outside your view with like 300m/s. It's only possible to avoid if he is fairly far away. 10 out of 10 times, when I get a friendly fire bounty, it's because there suddenly is a cop up in my face. Even single shots from 3 large lasers pretty much always go way over the friendly fire threshold.

I never bought that, I still don't buy that. When the cop is a few hundred meters away, you have all the time in the world to stop shooting before he crosses your firing line. And when he is very close to you, so that you can only see him shortly before he is in your line of fire, you can always clearly hear him seconds before that happens. You can also see his scanner blip moving towards you. Either way, situational awareness is everything to avoid friendly fire incidents.

I have 800 something kills, that amounts to several thousands shots fired. Of all these shots, four hit someone else but the intended target. And of these four cases, I could have avoided two of the friendly fire hits if I haven't become cocky and fired despite clearly seeing the cop in close vicinity to my target, and one was due to me underestimating the blast radius of a missile.

GunnerBill · Jul 22, 2015

Sherrif or Deputy?

Anson22 · Jul 22, 2015

I Had the same experience this morning. Whilst joining in the destruction of a pirate, the NPC who was sharing the kill dived over the top of me and into my line of fire. I stopped shooting almost instantly but clipped him with the laser. His response was along the lines of "watch where you're shooting I haven't got time to deal with you today". He didn't go hostile and after we'd completed the destruction of the pirate there was no further reaction to my indescretion. It seems that NPC's are now intelligent enough to spot an accident! And you've answered my question... 'are the Fed's also going to take a similar view of a 'heat of combat' accident?' - clearly yes

That's a great improvement of the AI !

Negative Entropy · Jul 22, 2015

this happens if you only do shield damage and did not target him.
if you target a clean vessel and do any shield or hull damage, you get fined.
if you did not target but did hull damage, you get fined
if he dies (within some time limit) you get bounty.

Ian Skippy · Jul 22, 2015

Spanksh said:
Sadly "situational awareness" is useless when a cop unexpectedly flies into your line of fire from outside your view with like 300m/s. It's only possible to avoid if he is fairly far away. 10 out of 10 times, when I get a friendly fire bounty, it's because there suddenly is a cop up in my face. Even single shots from 3 large lasers pretty much always go way over the friendly fire threshold.

If you lose situational awareness (which is another way of saying things unexpectedly happen around you) you stop firing until you've figured out whats happening. You have a radar, so you can clearly see when another ship is in close proximity. If its path is not clear stop firing. This however rarely happens: people generally dont even know there is a ship close by. In that situation unexpected things can and do happen, but they are caused by our failure to even recognize we've lost our awareness.

Greccen · Jul 22, 2015

Yeah well, just logged in, was still at a RES, and saw a 3 wing of wanteds, killed the 2 of them and the last one was going to explode so i shot my cannons just for the hell of it.

the cannons hit some clean npc doing a flyby as they were about to land. 200 cr bounty 6-7 ships turned from green to red in an instant.
in a system i swept out criminals for a while.. i escaped barely.

such immersiveness, logged out then.

Eros · Jul 22, 2015

I shot a cop... and I liked it.

Ok now thats over with, yeah iv never been let off, but that being said i do tend to use burst lasers while dropping shields and autocannons when chipping away at armour. SOOOoooo i guess there is too much hitting going on.

Neat though