1. Talk to mercenary officers in the comms tab of a market. They aren't terribly common. There's also at least one other way...
4. Salamander MRM. Its a strange missile but good, it will rapidly flank the target and home in on their engines. Does about 10 seconds EMP usually, but on larger ships it'll only get one or two engines per missile.
5. Any of Tri-Tachyon (blue faction) frigates are good, albiet finicky and occasionally a little weak for their command point cost. Each comes with a high tech ability as well as energy weapons, which are powerful against all forms of defense but expensive in terms of flux. You can buy the ships off the black market in Tri-Tachyon worlds, or you can befriend them and get a commission as a privateer to buy the ships legally. The Hegemony has a variant of the Wolf (teleporting starter ship) and pirates have a degraded version.
The hound is blazingly fast, but kind of sucks. In general hounds, cerebuses, and kites can be used to swarm ships with miniguns and homing missiles. Its not great but its not expensive either. Don't expect to win anything without a numbers advantage.
The Condor light carrier isn't fast exactly, but it can be an extremely practical platform for bombers and missiles and THOSE are fast. Don't let the price fool you, put aside at least 40k credits if you want to kit one of those out and have enough money left over to survive. You can order the fighters around even if you aren't flying it so there's no real need to fly it.
So I've been having an interesting game. After my Wolf got crippled I decided to supplement my Lasher with an Enforcer. Ended up kitting it out with four salamanders MRMs so that I can speed boost after fleeing frigates and then take out their engines. Several level 3 combat skills + armor hull mods make the pretty monsterous. Anyway, buying and kitting it out to go chase down a big bounty actually resulted in a Firefly moment when I ran out of money and could only partially purchase supplies and crew. Ended up mothballing the wolf to transfer its crew and then heading off. I ran out of fuel partway there and then drifted into the star's gravity well. Lasher was crippled in the fight and clearly would have been unable to flee if I lost the fight, that plus the lack of credits, supplies and food made the fight feel pretty damn high stakes. Managed to barely win and loot a small amount of fuel, which was just barely enough for me to drift back into a populated system to collect my money.
On the way back I saw a warning beacon over an unpopulated system. At port someone had a mission to scan a derelict ship in that sector (which I still don't know how to actually do), which sounded like such a hilariously movie-dumb idea that I had to agree to it. Only 10k reward but it was on my way back from the next bounty. Which BTW turned out to be a pirate version of my fleet, but with 3 extra Lashers. My Lasher wingman somehow managed to take out 1 Lasher on his own and maim another one (the NPCs in this game are hardcore) but his ship was destroyed. I managed to take out all 4 remainding ships, including pirate version of myself, but we lost the entire crew of the Lasher. I think it was because we literally couldn't support that many people on the Enforcer. I should probably carry an empty shuttle around so that doesn't happen again. And to carry loot.
Anyway, visited the warning beacon system on my way back. Pretty sure most of what I found was common, but the warning beacon and the high density of new content I found there made it feel like a big deal so I'll spoiler it...
So I warp into the system, and the first thing that I'm greeted by is a MASSIVE corona. Like it fills 80% of my screen and the star isn't even close to visible.
Turns out, I warped next to a supermassive red giant. I decide to check out if this corona is actually harmful, so I head in to a planet that was implausibly close. Like seriously, it should have melted, or been pulled in to the star. Anyway, a sensor ping around it reveals a huge debris field with a couple derelicts. I salvage one, get some fuel and supplies, more than I can carry actually. That's nice might as well get the oth-... wait, what does teal mean? What the fuck is a remnant?
Anyway, rogue fucking AI tells me a bunch of glitchy shit and then jumps me next to this huge star. Teleports everywhere and does some decent damage, but I take it out easy enough. End up getting an AI core, worth 10k. It is at this point I've finally gotten close enough to this star that the corona starts degrading my CR, but due to the combat damage I don't notice. Anyway, I slowly explore this massive sector, searching for more derelicts. I explore all the planets, can't survey any (I have neither the gear nor any kind of hazard survey ability, while the planets are at 75% hazard rating). At this point I realize that I am absolutely hemorrhaging supplies, so I move to complete my sweep. None of the derelicts have given me any kind of mission prompts or anything. Then I go to the last planet and its... terran? Next to the star that's probably going to go supernova, in a wasteland system full of wreckage and rogue AIs, there's a planet habitable to humans. WTF.
Anyway, long story short, I used my bounty money to get a Condor and bring back the supplies I needed to survey the world. Its apparently a class IV planet, the survey data being worth 50k! If I could colonize planets I would totally make that one my home base just for the sheer awesomeness of the whole thing.
I don't know how to actually complete the mission? Like is there a way to find the derelict i'm supposed to scan, and what do I do once I've found it?
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Topic: Starsector [TopDown Sandbox RPG on Space] (Read 370424 times)