Hey Ice,
Honestly this is easily debatable and it's going to really depend on the quality of life support you carry. There was a short time where I considered this, however I opted against it for a couple of reasons.
- Life support reserves are normally intended to be used when your ships cockpit gets blown out, which prevents atmosphere from building up and being breathable.
- Your life support reserves are finite, so once you use some of your reserve, it's gone. Turning the module on does not recharge that reserve. (I personally find this one a little illogical tbh, but it's a fact of the game).
- Once your life support reserves reach 0, you die and your ship explodes, period. So you have to make sure you turn it back on before that happens.
So, yes you can use it as a tactic... But if you are running a pure combat ship I would personally advise against it. What I personally do is put my life support at a lower priority than my critical ships components needed for survival/retreat. My thrusters and FSD are the absolutely highest priority on my ship, with my shields being on a priority below them, then my weapons. All lower priorities are used to have non-combat modules powered off during combat (My 6A fuel scoop).
My power priorities of 4 & 5 are set up in a way that allows me to run more SCB's than my ship can handle, but instead of having to manually toggle power between all three of them, I only ever have to toggle power on one of them. The way that I accomplished this is by setting all of my "non-combat" modules on priority 5, along with my 2 Class 3 SCB's. I also have a class 4 SCB, listed on Priority 4. When I toggle my Class 4 SCB module to on and have weapons deployed I do not have sufficient power to run everything, so at that point my power priorities will power off my two 3A SCB's and my non-combat modules freeing up the power for the 4A SCB. All I ever have to do to accomplish this is toggle the power state on the one module which keeps me from having to play a power management juggle-athon in the middle of combat.
But I digress... I assume you are currently in a much smaller ship than I am where power is a really big concern... One of the things you can try is putting your FSD/all other non combat modules at a lower power priority than your weapons. This is a valid tactic as when you retract your weapons they do not consume any power at all which will restore your FSD's power allowing you to flee or travel.
The biggest point of my response is tweak with the power priority settings. There are only 5 priorities... But they are really powerful if you tweak with it. I've gotten ships running effectively with 10-15% higher power consumption than the ships actual output.
