Ok, so while on another trade run I got interdicted literally seconds from dropping to a station, and this one I said “To hell with it” and dropped out of supercruise.
Dumbass NPC pirate (in something much smaller than my T9), all by himself, demands 3000 credits of cargo. I instead oblige him by deploying my NPC crewmate in a fighter and unloading 5 multi-cannons in his face.
I probably could’ve just boosted forward and pasted the little bastard on mass alone but I wanted to see how deploying fighters worked
Also, I just learned that FDev is rebalancing payouts for various activities and apparently today was the day where they updated how many credits you get paid for a bounty on wanted ships. Because the numbers aren’t finalized yet, the popup still shows old amounts, but if you look in the Transactions area of your ship’s nav console it’ll show the “correct” updated amount, which is what you’ll get once it’s turned in.
Seeing reports of “at least doubled” amounts for these bounties and for massacre/assassination missions, but they don’t apply to conflict zones yet…
Guess I’ll yank my Alliance Chieftain dakkaship over to where I’ve been doing the trade runs and do some nav-beacon camping to see how much this really increases after I get done with work…
Edit: YEP. Spent 10 minutes at the nav beacon shooting shit-tier tiny pirates, made 300k credits. Definitely improved. (Previously, that may have only been 75k or less!)
Sounds like what they did to the exploration data a couple of years back. What used to be values in the thousands of credits jumped by a factor of 10 or more, depending on what you scanned.
I just took the FdL out for a spin and the bounties you get for shooting pirates are significantly increased.
Got bored, sold the Python since it was bulky and not that good at turning and bought a Krait, mostly so I can have a combat ship roughly on-par with the Python but also have a fighter bay for extra zippy dakka.
It’s a bit tighter on power but I was able to take down a Deadly NPC Anaconda mission target with the multicannons, railguns, and fighter…might try to switch the multis to pulse lasers or something but power on this thing is SUPER tight for some reason.
So, it turns out if your thrusters get damaged you just spin around helplessly apparently forever. I’m spinning too much for the enemy ship to hit me enough to kill me, but there is nothing I can do but spin…
Auto-Field Maintenance Units can sometimes be useful in combat for critical modules like that, but most of the time in most ships you’ll be better served by filling those optional slots with either hull or module reinforcement units to keep the modules from getting hit in the first place.
Yeah, I didn’t plan this trip well and upgraded to a Cobra without checking the available modules so I’m stuck with a crappy shield for now and the other upgrades I need are in another system. Just tryin gto finish the massacre missions I already took is painful.
Can I grab a copy of your Krait load-out? The FdL (4 over-charged multi-cannons, 1 over-charged beam laser) runs out of puff when it comes to shooting anything bigger than a Dropship…
Anything like an Imp Cutter, Python, or 'conda is too crunchy for me.
It runs REAL close to maxing out its available power and I haven’t engineered much on it beyond a little bit of the shields and FSD (mostly because I only have two engineers open and those are the two blueprints I have set for remote access), but it works pretty well in combat. I haven’t taken it into a HazRes or high-threat fight yet, but from playing around with it in some low-threat extraction sites yesterday the pulse lasers will chew through shields REAL quick and then you just have to be able to actually hit with the railguns (since they’re fixed).
Nice looking build. I have most of (all?) the in-bubble Engineers unlocked, so there’s a lot of room for me to improve your build. I’m not so certain about the whole PowerPlay thing and faction-specific upgrades, but that’s just me…
Thanks!
I’ll also have to improve my piloting, as gimballed weapons make it a lot easier to shoot things!
I take the FdL into a HIRES in the rings of HQ Aquarii 4 for some anti-pirate fun time. Given I’m based in LTT 9455, it’s a short (~11LY) jump.
Yeah, I know I should go unlock all the Engineers at some point and should probably go actually take this to them to get the stuff done to it, but that’ll take time (especially since beyond the two I already have unlocked, I only have an invitation from one of them and it requires getting combat bond vouchers, I think? and I have no idea where those come from. And also no idea how to get invites from the rest.)
Decided to spend some time tonight trying to unlock some of the other Engineers, so I flew over to where Liz Ryder is in the Krait and headed to a station to refuel. On the way, I passed a pretty Earthlike world with a silly name.
Unlocking the engineers is a grind. I checked, and I was wrong - I still have a lot of Engineer unlocking ahead of me.
Inarz.cz has a pretty good map of who can engineer what, and what you need to achieve to unlock more engineers. There are some engineers all the way out at/near Colonia, so be prepared for a long haul in the black if you are wanting something specific and can’t be found in the bubble.
This guide is a bit out of date now, but gives the quickest way to unlock most of the engineers. I might have to go back and pick up where I left off…
Ugh. Forgot how much unlocking engineers sucks sometimes.
Came over in my Krait, need Cordial with the local leading mafia faction to get the invite. Can’t bounty hunt as it’s a lawless system. Ok, missions then…except all the missions are "Investors want X number of Y items), so I transfer over my old mining AspX to go grab enough for one or two missions to get to Cordial.
Now the engineer wants 200 units of freaking landmines. I am NOT doing 4 gorram runs for landmines, so I paid the exorbitant transfer cost and am waiting 20 minutes for my damn Type-9 to get transferred here. (Yes, I checked to make sure the engineer’s station actually has large landing pads first…)
And to think I’m only really doing THIS engineer because I need to be on good terms with her to get to OTHER engineers…
