I'm new to ED and enjoy doing bounties in Haz RES so I've engineered my shield up to grd 5 thermal resistance with fast recharge and have 4 shield boosters engineered to grd 3 on a python 2 as that's the level of engineering available to me at the moment. Now I am no great pilot but I'm getting better. I've been able to take out some bigger ships like Python and Cutter. My shields go down pretty quickly although I'm getting better about avoiding so much jousting and just being a somewhat stationary target which helps. But what I don't get is how npcs' shields recharge so fast vs mine which once they drop they tend to stay there even with the fast recharge engineering. For instance, I just took on an Anaconda and was doing well but after I got his shields down I missed eyes on target for about 5 seconds and when I looked again his shield was already back to 30%. How the heck can he recharge so quickly? Am I missing something? FYI, I ended up aborting with his hull in the high 30s bc I suffered a cockpit breach but hey, live to fight another day.
legit question about dogfighting
- Thread starter cmdr jonnimew
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npc magic lol.they also jump out with no fsd and if you take there power plant they fight on,and so it goes.live with it,as i said magic.lolo
Anacondas like to pack shield cell banks. You can see it activating, there's a wave like effect that washes over the shield.
They might be using shield cell banks, which allow regenerating shields really fast (a limited number of times).
Even without them, the regeneration rate of shields depends on their type, size and class, as well as the power distributor and pips.
The NPCs, being the computer controlled beings they are, are very good at PIP and power management. The number of PIPs you have set to SYS greatly influences both the strength as well as the recharge rate. With no PIPs in SYS you get your raw base strength. with two PIPs, your shields are 1.5 times your raw strength, with four PIPs the factor is 2.5 times. So make it a habit to adjust your pips from moment to moment.
As for the recharge, as an example, my Mandalay with 1438 raw shields takes 5 minutes 30 seconds to rebuild to 100% with four PIPs, but over 12 minutes with only one PIP in SYS. So after a battle, put four PIPs in SYS to recover as fast as possible.
Also, as mentioned, a lot of NPCs carry shield cell banks, which speeds up recovery drastically. The best tactic against NPCs is targeting their power plant and destroying it instead of just eating away their hull. Destroying the PP has two effects; one: The NPCs lose their shields for good (their shield generator is disabled by power management), and two, each additional hit to the PP has a chance to trigger critical failure that leads to the destruction of the ship. I have exploded Anacondas with almost 50% hull this way.
Rebuild your ship on EDSY.org and play with the pips, and see for yourself the effect it has on your systems. Here is an example ship of mine you can also play around with.
(edited for spelling)
As for the recharge, as an example, my Mandalay with 1438 raw shields takes 5 minutes 30 seconds to rebuild to 100% with four PIPs, but over 12 minutes with only one PIP in SYS. So after a battle, put four PIPs in SYS to recover as fast as possible.
Also, as mentioned, a lot of NPCs carry shield cell banks, which speeds up recovery drastically. The best tactic against NPCs is targeting their power plant and destroying it instead of just eating away their hull. Destroying the PP has two effects; one: The NPCs lose their shields for good (their shield generator is disabled by power management), and two, each additional hit to the PP has a chance to trigger critical failure that leads to the destruction of the ship. I have exploded Anacondas with almost 50% hull this way.
Rebuild your ship on EDSY.org and play with the pips, and see for yourself the effect it has on your systems. Here is an example ship of mine you can also play around with.
(edited for spelling)
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Wow, great info and advice thanks all! Also, how does one target subsystems on ships, like power plants for instance? I have no idea how to do this.
check options targeting it will be in there select sub systems pick youre keys on keyboard.
When you target a ship, a new tab comes up in the left hand panel of your ship that allows you to select a subsystem to target. You should see a small orange square show up on that subsystem. Since it’s in a physical place on the ship you do more or less damage depending on what direction you are shooting from. I think rails and other penetrating weapons tend to be more effective at doing damage, but the target is very small.
Having been hit in the PP by other CMDRs I can personally confirm the damage can be catastrophic
Check the bindings under Options > Controls > Ship Control > Targeting.
Great stuff, ty! I'm upping my bounty game 
youll be shieldless thargoid interceptor hunting in no time
you will get better its only practise and learning as you go,ups and downs in this game are part of the learnig curve,hard game at time but go cmdr go,have fun.the way youre going ill keep out of youre way lol.07
Ha Ha Ha, Thargoids are scary. My only experience with them has been dying--twice--when I made the unfortunate blunder of crossing their paths and being pulled out of hyperspace. Of course I was super new then in an unengineered Viper Mk 3 and it was right before the big battle that killed that last big one. By the way I've seen several videos of CMDRs fighting Thargoids without shields but no one has ever explained why that is. I assumed it was to avoid their EMP attacks but idk tbh.
Once you've started fighting Thargoids you also start to have quite a different attitude towards being destroyed, ganked and the rebuy
. And once you become successful at fighting Thargoids, you wallet also becomes much thicker and you never ever worry about the rebuy again.Flying shieldless against Thargoids has multiple reasons to my knowlege: First, Thargoids do phasing damange, meaning a percentage of their attack goes through your shield, so shields are only partially effective to begin with. I don't know how large of a percentage though.
Then the shields enlarge your hit profile, which you want to minimize against Thargoids, unless you fly a big ship, I guess. Also, not dealing with shields in you PIP management is one less thing to deal with in the heat of the battle. Next, you want your ship to run as cold as possible; once you're under 20% heat the interceptors cannot track you properly anymore, and when you orbit them properly at that temperature, they will miss every single shot of their cannons. A shield generator will possibly raise your heat profile substentially and make it harder to run sufficiently cold.
Another tool for disrupting their targeting that is the frequent use of silent running, which renders your shields inoperable anyway, and depending on the generator build they take way too long to recover, and take away vital PIPs from your distributor in the process.
Then there is their lightning attack. It's best not to get caught in it at all, but when you do (and as a beginner, you will frequently), it drains your shields. And lastly, with a typical AX build it is hard to have effective shields anyway. Thargoid damage is absolute damage, meaning it ignores all resistances, so all that counts is raw strength. The ships typically used have limited unitlity slots that are usually filled with AX toys like the shutdown field neutralizer, heatsinks, AX scanners and caustic sinks, so you can't bring any shield boosters. Which means your shields will be paper thin to begin with anyway.
In conclusion you're better off just not bringing them at all, instead invest in proper armor and just stay cold and not get hit in the first place. All that goes for the typical medium sized AX builds like Chieftains and Kraits. The rules are a bit different for Anaconda builds or specialized builds against Hunters.
A piece of advice: When you eventually get interested in Thargoid combat and read the (otherwise brilliant) guides on the AX wiki, don't do the mistake I did and get discouraged by all the guides saying you need to master FA off first. You don't. You can do it FA on. You might never deliver peak goid hunting perfomance, and you have to adapt the orbiting technique a bit, but it is perfectly doable. I only do it FA on and do well enough for my lazy approach - I got up to Medusas without swarms, and don't have the stamina to fight Hydras anyway.
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NPCs tend to have much lower upfront shield values than Engineered CMDR vessels that are focused on front-loading shield strength. The lower the total shield strength, the faster they regenerate, proportionally speaking.
If your shield are staying down with a fast recharge sheild gen, you are almost certainly bottoming out your SYS capacitor. No energy in SYS = no shield recharge at all. Also, the higher your shield generator's recharge rate the greater the SYS draw. Since a collapsed shield is restored once it reaches 50% capacity, having a huge shield pool will significantly increase the time it takes for any given recharge rate to restore a collapsed shield. For hybrid vessels (those that are intended to keep fighting through shield collapses and recharges) managing SYS draw and shield boosters (if you have any high-cap boosters, turning them off after the first shield collapse is prudent) are important tactical considerations.
A typical NPC Anaconda probably has a modest level of upfront shielding, but a large shield generator with a relatively rapid regen rate and an even larger power distributor that doesn't need much management to keep SYS from bottoming out.
Human NPCs play by exactly the same rules as CMDRs in these respects.
ok after reading comments I have to thank you all again and I've changed my loadout somewhat with noticeable improvement. 6A shield is now thermal resistant with thermo block experimental. My four boosters are resistance augmented with super capcitor exp. Shield is gd 5 but boosters only at gd3 due to engineer unlock limitations atm. My hull is military with gd 5 heavy duty with deep plating as is a 3D hull reinforcement and they do a really good job taking npc fire although admittedly the build is a little weak for missles and canons. I use weapons at 3-4 pips and engine at 2-3 often with system 1-2 max unless i see the shield really taking a beating. But mostly I rely on my hull/armor to take the hits. The primary reason I devote so much power to engines is I find I have to boost often to keep up with and keep my nose on target for maximum amount of time. If i didn't boost the fight would take twice as long because npcs would have more time for shield to recharge. That said I have been able to take out a couple anacondas now, at least three federal drops ships, a regular python or two (those things are tough), and a pack of three asp exps or 3 cobra 3s, and various dbx and vultures, which in some respects are a bigger pita than the larger slower ships. That said I am definitely not ready to take on thargoids by a long shot and interesting about the boosters drawing power keeping the shield from recharging faster. I didn't even think about that. But I'm having fun and at least am no longer a sitting duck having to wait for security to knock down bad guys shields before charging in. Now I usually start the fight myself (unless it's a trio with a conda in the lead lol). Oh, I also use a kill warrant scanner bc I ready it pays out a bonus for scanned bounties although I'm not really sure how to tell if that's true.