Honved wrote: ↑Wed, 24. Oct 18, 18:32
I've found that a handful of combat drones make an excellent distraction. Normally, flail missiles impact pretty quickly against a larger target, so they're only a brief distraction for the turrets. Combat drones tend to live longer (they're not TRYING to crash into the target), meaning less of them needed in the long run. They don't do a lot of damage to a capital ship's level of shielding, so hull damage is rarely an issue. That frees up your M7M to waste less Hammers to drop the shields due to being shot down, and not lose a lot of very pricey boarding pods (the pods are cheap enough, but the contents...) on their way to target. One or two last-minute flails can still be a good idea, for a bit of additional cover for your marines when it matters most.
In my opinion it is not necessary to cover boarding pods with too many Flail Barrage Missiles.
If your ship is far enough from the target, then you don't care usually about turrets of the boarded ship.
Since you send boarding pods when shields of the boarded ship are low, then you can't send too many Flail Barrage Missiles, covering boarding pods anyway.
For smaller ships this can cause destruction of boarded ship.
If you do not intend to destroy some dangerous equipment of the boarded ship, then you fire Flail Barrage Missiles to suppress shield regeneration only during flight of the boarding pods (one missile per few seconds, for example). Once marines have penetrated the hull of the boarded ship, you don't need to fire any more missiles.
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And I want to add some information about boarding of the enemy ships using Cobra.
If you attack enemy ships with Flail Barrage Missiles you must maintain safe distance from them, which is defined by weapon range of the enemy ships and weapon range of your own Cobra.
Few shots of Rear Turret of your own Cobra can destroy small boarded ship, larger enemy ships can damage your own vessel too.
Cobra has speed 97 m/s.
But, boarded ships can have speed more than it:
Pirate Carrack can have speed up to 106.2 m/s,
Pirate Centaur can have speed up to 126 m/s,
Yaki Chokaro can have speed up to 154 m/s, etc.
To maintain safe distance you can use strafe drives and maximum speed of the Cobra can be up to 119 m/s because of them.
If you can't outrun boarded ship, then you can use jump drive to jump to some gate of the sector and increase distance.
