RainerPrem wrote:
RainerPrem wrote:@Raven: You just mentioned the Balor in the X4-thread. I didn't realize what that ship does. Can I command it to take out a target's jump drive and engines and then stop shooting Novadrones?
I bought me a Balor, but nothing points to any special features with Novadrones. Can it be that this was removed during one of the patches?
No, it's like I said, unfortunately: the only way to direct other ships to specifically attack a particular surface element MAY BE (I haven't tested this yet) to be in your Skank, targeting that element, and using the radial menu to designate it as target. Firstly, though, as mentioned above I haven't yet tested to see whether the ships will target that element, or the ship that it's on - if the latter, that means the method isn't valid, and there's no way at all to order ships to focus (unlike in X3, where you could order ships to attack shields, for instance.) Secondly, only you squad can be ordered to attack a designated target, and the WHOLE squad - which can be inconvenient unless your "squad" consists of just a specialist ship.
You'd think that a specialist-role ship with a specialized co-axial-mounted weapon would have command options pertaining specifically to that, right? Oh well...
RainerPrem wrote:
Edit: Another question: Is there any chance to repair the reputation with UA? It's at -15 at the moment, so we don't shot at each other, but I am not allowed to dock at their stations. And it seems that the X3-feature to find any of their members on other stations doesn't exist any longer. And if ... the Plutarchs were also hostile to me. Tse only possibility I see is to kill enemy ships in their sectors. But who are their enemies - apart from me?
Unfortunately, the only way I know of to repair a reputation at that level (I think below -7 is where the difficulty starts, with loss of docking privileges and willingness to even talk ie. no missions) is what you described. They do have one enemy I can think of, off the top of my head - Xenon, which do roam around the Fields of Opportunity. Sadly, because the UA stations don't have neighbours, you can't summon up Xenon by taking missions from another faction and then intercepting them on the way in and hoping they're in the UA station's "airspace" - so you will have to hang around and wait, and/or roam around a bit, snag the attention of any Xenon you find, then laboriously lure them toward any UA station, and execute them. Fortunately, as you observed when repairing your Plutarch reputation, at that level each enemy killed has a significant positive impact on your relations.
UA and Cartel are odd and tricky beasts - you'd think that they have TU as an enemy, since they constantly prey on their ships, and yet... you likely noticed how the Marauder Phoenixes are often docked at Overwatch to offload the loot they just shot out of TU (and other) ships! Right under Overwatch's nose! I understand what Ego were trying to do with those two dodgy factions, but the implementation is highly inelegant, by dint of being nonsensically inconsistent.
RainerPrem wrote:I think I'm going crazy. I found an ATL Arawn far away from support. I killed all its drones, I demolished everything on its surface, even the two drone bays deep in its bowels. And now I'm shooting at it like for an eternity and can't get its hull below 40%. Each time it reached 39 it goes up again.
What the ...?
The reason why the engineer is so effective on an Arawn (and, you'll find, also on Fulmekrons and Lyramekrons) is that engineers repair hulls as a percentage-over-time, and those particular ships' hulls being very thick, the result is a high number of hull-points repaired per unit time. The Skank's weapons have a hard time keeping up unless, as Alan pointed out, you supplement with ammo expenditure - or, as Alan suggested and you already discovered, you simply enlist the help of a capital ship's weapons.
heheheheh. At present I have a billion in credits (not counting a few hundred million in a few stations that aren't sending me their profits - since I don't need those funds, I'm leaving them there to see how high they get - I'm sure it keep increasing indefinitely), and 10s of millions rolling in every hour, but I can't spend any of it: buying ships is pointless, as even getting a Taranis and four Olmekrons to do anything is making me pull out my hair (if you knew how short I keep it, you'd realise what a feat that is!) 
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