Mass Driver - a Luddite's best friend

[GCU Grey Area]

Recently been testing the boarding capabilities of the new Acinonyx Prototype. Thought an M6 which can launch boarding pods ought to be quite good at it, as long as you have decent quality marines since you can only send 8.

After a few practice runs on pirate M6s to get their fighting skills up spotted the prize I'd been after for days - a Minotaur with a jump beacon in the hold. Only slight catch - this Minotaur had all the trimmings: Hull Polarising, Internal Lasers, Advanced Firewall & full squad of 20 high quality marines (all rated at either 4 or 5 stars). Now normally I'd use either Ion Disruptors or mk1 Fighter Drones to deal with this problem. However Acinonyx can't use the former & hold is a bit cramped for the latter, so decided I needed a Plan C - thought give Mass Drivers a go instead.

Called in a support ship & swapped out a bank of 6 ISRs for MDs & loaded up 50 crates of ammo. Annoyed the Minotaur until it started jumping, followed it & kept up the harassment until it ran out of e-cells. Then kept pestering it until it ran out of missiles & I could go to work.

Just shooting it with Mass Drivers didn't work. Although they bypass shields & do hull damage, turns out they won't destroy equipment unless those shields have been depleted first. Then they really rock. You know how Ion Disruptors are characteristically painfully slow at destroying kit? Mass Drivers aren't. Guess it's something to do with Mass Drivers having almost 6x the fire rate of Ion Disruptors & I'd just installed 6 of them...

32 crates of ammo later (that's around 90 seconds of continuous fire) they'd killed all the enemy marines when their life support failed & smashed through everything else I wanted to get rid of (along a ton of stuff I'd rather have kept, such as the jumpdrive). They also trashed the hull - Minotaur had 56% hull integrity remaining by the time I was done. However those Mass Drivers got the job done (my marines secured the jump beacon without casualties) & did it far more rapidly than I was even remotely expecting.

I'd certainly recommend them to any other impatient pirates who want to give their marines the best possible chance of surviving the op but who loathe the time it takes to short out all the anti-boarding kit with Ion Disruptors.

[DrBullwinkle]

Good solution.

If you keep 6x ISR and 6x MD on your Acinonyx at all times, then you can use Weapons Groups to control which guns to use when. Strip the shields with the ISR's, then strip equipment with MD's.

Nice one, Grey Area.

[thatguyfromvienna]

Would be interesting whether this works against M7s and M2s as well...

[GCU Grey Area]

Good solution.

If you keep 6x ISR and 6x MD on your Acinonyx at all times, then you can use Weapons Groups to control which guns to use when. Strip the shields with the ISR's, then strip equipment with MD's.

Nice one, Grey Area.

Thanks for your reply, I was quite chuffed when it actually worked.
For convenience got my weapon groups mapped to the hat controller on my joystick:
Up = everything
Right = 6x MD
Left = 6x ISR
Down = 2x ISR (for when 6 would be overkill)

Also have to thank you for making the fantastic Long Range Scanner which was incredibly handy for locating the target & following it as it jumped.

[Lea Flamma]

Well, I gues that the fastest fireing weapon with the slowest hull damage would do the trick. As far as I know losing equipment is random, with each hull hit. It seems that it requires the shield to be depleted. But a nice strategy, never thought of using MD as the "cleaning" weapon.

[ajax34i]

Yeah, somewhat related, I was trying (again, because of a new start) to capture a Hyperion with just an M3 and a TP, and the TP would just not launch marines and would just get clobbered.

Until I decided, to hell with 97% hull, I have decent marines, so I shot the Hyperion to about 47% hull, which slowed it down ALOT and wiped out quite a few of its turrets, which allowed the TP to survive and position itself to launch marines. It ended up at 23% hull after the capture.

EDIT: Imagine the messages the Captain must have been hearing with during your Mass Driver barrage:

You your y y your your y your your y your y y y yo your y y y yo your y y y y y your y your y y y yo your 200 MJ shields have been destroyed.

[Sovereign01]

Found that even if you equip 12 MDs, it'll take forever to wear down the likes of a Xenon I. On the plus side it munches through Xenon P/PXs in seconds

[InFlamesForEver]

Found that even if you equip 12 MDs, it'll take forever to wear down the likes of a Xenon I. On the plus side it munches through Xenon P/PXs in seconds

I honestly find anything other than ramming takes its time to wear down a Xenon I. I just get the shields down and ram it with a ship that has a large amount of shields. Always does the trick and I usually lose less shields than trying to take it out with lasers.

[GCU Grey Area]

Would be interesting whether this works against M7s and M2s as well...

Well, since my last post I went on to nobble a Ryu TL, Agamemnon M7 & Zeus M1 (even managed to get one of the Zeus' M3s to bail as a bonus). Same tactics & boarding crew as before. Still no casualties. Seems that 8 marines are sufficient for most targets, assuming that they are trained to 100% in all areas (esp. fighting) & any inconvenient anti-boarding countermeasures are hosed away with a liberal spray of MD bullets. Acinonyx has now definitely become my favourite ship for boarding ops in the game. Probably still need an M7M for Xenon targets (to carry enough marines) but for everything else I reckon Acinonyx should suffice.

EDIT: Imagine the messages the Captain must have been hearing with during your Mass Driver barrage:

You your y y your your y your your y your y y y yo your y y y yo your y y y y y your y your y y y yo your 200 MJ shields have been destroyed.

Well, yeah - by my calculation I fired around 6,400 bullets into that Minotaur - bound to hit something important with a barrage like that...

Found that even if you equip 12 MDs, it'll take forever to wear down the likes of a Xenon I. On the plus side it munches through Xenon P/PXs in seconds Very Happy

Not trying to take out absolutely everything on the target ships myself, just the kit that will kill my marines (e.g. sentry lasers, life support for defending marines). Not trying to get rid of all the guns. Flying Acinonyx means I don't need to. I can launch the pods at point blank range - very hard for the target to shoot them down in the few seconds of flight before they latch on. However unless the devs have changed the odds for boarding Xenon vessels I doubt 8 marines will be enough to steal a Xenon I. Would however be very glad to be proved wrong on that point - have always hated having to use M7Ms for Xenon capitals.

[SIMON POPPLEWELL]

Nice one GCU Grey Area, I wouldn't of thought of using MDs to strip equipment. What's next an M2?

[GCU Grey Area]

Nice one GCU Grey Area, I wouldn't of thought of using MDs to strip equipment. What's next an M2?

How did you guess? Odysseus is in the bag or, more accurately, on it's way to HQ to be melted down for scrap. Decided not to bother building a support complex for it in this game. Since I got a fantastic new ship for boarding ops it's infinitely more fun to build my ships out of other people's.

[SIMON POPPLEWELL]

Nice one GCU Grey Area, I wouldn't of thought of using MDs to strip equipment. What's next an M2?

How did you guess? Odysseus is in the bag or, more accurately, on it's way to HQ to be melted down for scrap. Decided not to bother building a support complex for it in this game. Since I got a fantastic new ship for boarding ops it's infinitely more fun to build my ships out of other people's.

[GCU Grey Area]

Brief update & a couple of questions:

Been using the pirate sectors around Mercenaries' Rift as a training ground to improve my lads fighting skills. No RRF ships there to interfere by nuking the ship my marines are busy commandeering. Ran out of pirate M6s to board in those sectors pretty quickly, so since then have been doing odd jobs for the pirates: assassinations, station defence, that sort of thing. Problem is a lot of these missions are spawning mostly M7s & fighters, but not many M6s.

Been wondering about parking somewhere safe (docked inside my Kyoto in a core sector should be safe enough) & using SETA to reduce my combat rank a bit, so the missions produce more M6s & fewer M7s. Does SETA still work that way?

Unsure because I haven't used SETA that way since TC version 1.0 where combat missions got really silly at high ranks. So many ships would spawn that the game couldn't keep up with it; every ship in the sector stopped moving & their turret scripts stopped working. Needed to periodically SETA back down the combat ranks to make the missions playable again.

However that was a long time ago (& a different game) so it is entirely possible they might have changed things since then - don't want to leave my computer running for a long time if I'm going to be exactly the same combat rank at the end as when I started. Also, any idea how long I need to leave it? Currently Battlemaster & ideally I'd like to drop down to somewhere around Warlord or Vindicator.

[SIMON POPPLEWELL]

I wouldn't recommend using SETA, you can come back and find you've lost half your assets. You could hijack npc TMs that run through the pirate sectors, the negative rep hit is pretty low for boarding TMs and is very easy to repair with just doing the odd mission. This is how I train up most of my marines.

[GCU Grey Area]

I wouldn't recommend using SETA, you can come back and find you've lost half your assets.

Risk I'm willing to take. Frankly I don't have that much stuff to lose, since I'm mostly playing a combat-based game. Currently own just 1 tiny complex making missiles (Tornado, Hammer, Hurricane) & MD ammo. It's located in Aldrin so should be safe enough anyway. Aside from that it's just a few freighters; a dozen or so CAGs, based at the Hub, trading food & minerals exclusively in Terran sectors. These are supplemented by a few mk3 traders, generally configured with a 3 sector jump limit, again operating primarily in Terran space.

Anyway, could lose everything & afford to replace it all several times over. Would be a pity to lose the pilots but it wouldn't take all that long to train replacements & the money those ships bring in isn't really that significant (it's peanuts compared to the mission rewards I'm getting). Mostly they are just there to improve trade rank & make non-combat missions more profitable.

You could hijack npc TMs that run through the pirate sectors, the negative rep hit is pretty low for boarding TMs and is very easy to repair with just doing the odd mission. This is how I train up most of my marines.

Now that is not a bad idea at all. I'd overlooked TMs. I avoided them in TC because IMO the risk:reward balance was off - no way to get back the cost of even a single fatality of a fully trained marine (due to the low resale value of the captured ship). Though it occurs to me that risk assessment was on the basis of the hazards of spacewalk boarding - much lower chance of being shot on the way to the target when they're launched in a pod from my Acinonyx. May have to reassess that.

Do TMs carry marines in AP? I ask because I've been getting some pretty decent captures among the crew of the few combat mission M6s I've been able to board recently. Majority have tended to be rank 0 but of the rest (I'd estimate around 30% of my captives) several have had 3-4 ranks in fighting & have been a welcome addition to my marine training program.

[SIMON POPPLEWELL]

Do TMs carry marines in AP? I ask because I've been getting some pretty decent captures among the crew of the few combat mission M6s I've been able to board recently. Majority have tended to be rank 0 but of the rest (I'd estimate around 30% of my captives) several have had 3-4 ranks in fighting & have been a welcome addition to my marine training program.

Very rare that they carry marines. Also when you demand they drop freight they will usually drop all weapons including the equipped weapons on their turrets. That's why it's a good idea to target weapon dealer TMs.

[GCU Grey Area]

Very rare that they carry marines. Also when you demand they drop freight they will usually drop all weapons including the equipped weapons on their turrets. That's why it's a good idea to target weapon dealer TMs.

That's funny, I can imagine the situation: "Damn, the pirates are coming. Quick - chuck all the guns out the airlock & maybe they'll leave us alone...".

Thanks for your advice. Been nabbing TMs (& trashing my rep) for the last couple of hours. I'd forgotten the other reason why I never went after TMs in TC - a lot of them are owned by corporations which I was working for & periodically gave me unique ships. No corp missions in AP so nothing to discourage me from hunting their TMs. Also been really glad I bought a Kyoto a while ago. Haven't done much with it up until now (war ended before I'd even finished arming it) but recently it's been very handy for ferrying batches of captured TMs to the recycling facilities at HQ.