Newcomer / Intro Thermal attack & immediate destroy | What's wrong with me?

[Troopi]

Here, mate. Check out this optimized DBX for exploration.
You can engineer it as you like, but give priority to the FSD (increased range+mass manager) and the Engine (dirty +drag drives)
Diamondback Explorer Mk1

An extra: it can work as a fuel rat too.

 

[d8veh]

Hi cmdrs,

old returning noob here. Played like 5 y ago for 100ish hours, then stopped and here we go again.
Came back for exploring basically, since I watched some tutorials to get money easily.
Hope to find some hint here about thermal attacks.

I have been interdicted 4 times (NPC) since I came back.
In the past it happened as well of course: sometimes I defeated the attacker or escaped, sometimes I died.
Fair enough.

Now I can only spectate the very same situation: thermal attack, shields offline and ciao ciao. It all lasts like 2 seconds.
Never experienced something like that before. At least we could fight a bit.

I am flying a Diamondback Expl. now.
Best power plant and shields, reinforced alloys. OK, no shield booster or other stuff in order to increase jump range.

Do I just need shield boosters, heatsinks and chaff launcher to avoid this sudden-death? It is just that or is there something I'm missing?
I doubt I'll have the chance to launch chaff or something as it happens, given how fast it is.

Thanks for enlightening me!
I'll buy you Romulan Ale.

You should never get blown up when exploring in a DBX. There is no need for shields, weapons nor armour. Nobody will shoot you because you're not carrying anything they want. Astronomical data is safe. If an NPC interdictor shot at you, it was because you were carrying something.

If you look in your logfile, you can see the messages that the NPC gave. They will tell you why it shot you. Logfiles in this folder, where USER is the name you use to logo to Windows:
C:\Users\USER\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous

 

[Para Handy]

...... Logfiles in this folder, where USER is the name you use to logo to Windows:
C:\Users\USER\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous

Just for reference there is a short way of going to / describing / whatever that address:

%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous


The %USERPROFILE% and the %LOCALAPPDATA% thingies are dead useful.

 

[colprice2002]

Hi,

I'll differ from the above comment regarding shields for an explorer! Some time ago I had the experience of recalling a ship to collect my SRV, only to find the autopilot liked bouncing it off the planet surface! 100% hull tp 1% in 3 bounces...
Since then, I've always fitted a shield to an explorer - just the minimum mass available - to prevent silly bounces/minor collisions causing a rebuy screen. It's embarrassing in deep space!
Certainly, I don't carry weapons in my explorer ships - the larger ones may carry a mining laser for extended range jumps, but nothing more.

If you're trying to evade, adjust the throttle to the centre of the blue markings, and 4 pips to engines.

If you do get regular npc interdictions, thenyou're either carrying valuable cargo (meta-alloys?) or you have a bounty on you.
The bounty system has change in the last few years - it now applies to the ship and its modules. it used to apply to the CMDR. It's quite possible to swap ships (from a wanted one to a clean one) then transfer a wanted module to the new ship and re-instate a bounty! Check your modules for status...

 

[Esteban]

Lots of good advice here. I would definitely use the opportunity to become proficient in evading interdictions. That's a skill that allows you to be in control of how you want to play this part of the game in the future
When I was in this situation, I would stack black box or salvage missions, ensuring that I would encounter interdiction attempts by NPCs. Boy did that give me practice at evading them!

At the risk of being repetitious (not sure it was elaborated thoroughly)- submitting to an interdiction (that is: zero-ing your throttle) is a tactic that you can use in a couple of ways:
1) At some point you'll be able to choose whether to kill the NPC interdictor or not.
2) Perhaps more importantly (at least for now) if it looks like you're going to be unable to evade the interdiction, submitting rather than failing is very beneficial because it results in a short FSD cooldown, allowing you to wake much more quickly.
Apologies if you already knew that detail.

Other CMDRs here are right; there's little reason that you shouldn't be able to evade NPC interdictions at some point almost effortlessly. Human players are a completely different story.

 

[NorthernDevo]

You should never get blown up when exploring in a DBX. There is no need for shields, weapons nor armour. Nobody will shoot you because you're not carrying anything they want. Astronomical data is safe. If an NPC interdictor shot at you, it was because you were carrying something.

Agreed with the weapons, but not with the shields and armour.
Accidents do happen, and after a rather embarrassing lithobraking incident while entering a canyon, I head out with a bump-shield (lowest class I can fit) and some engineered zero-mass armour. (You can G5 Lightweight Alloys armour to some fairly decent protection while still remaining zero-mass. )

 

[the100thmonkey]

I'd bet they were NPC, but I only had the chance to read a comment once ike "you avoid to pay something then you have to die". I don't know if it rings a bell. However, 4 times.

NPC bounty hunters say this when you have failed or abandoned a mission with a penalty, or if you have a bounty on your head.

You probably have a dormant bounty that you don't remember from your first stint in the game. Head to a low security system, dock and find the interstellar factors contact (in, naturally, the contacts menu) and pay the bounty off.