Capital Ships Mining Themselves

[blackarro18]

So i'm having a bit of a problem where after i've disabled a ship, knocked everything out and am working on their shields they deploy a crap ton of mines right next to their ship, which are untargetable and cant be destroyed without blowing up the ship i am trying to capture. Some of these mines are also tracker mines that chase me off into space. How are you supposed to capture these ships if they just create a minefield around themselves essentially committing suicide?

[euclid]

There are a few ships like that, so called "freebees", surrounded by tracker mines. Also some missions point to those. I never had a ship surround itself by mines rather than the pilot just bailing out. However, I guess the "usual" tactics applies here, too. It will take a while and requires some patience:

Approache the first mines very careful and slow. If they start to move towards you then back off. This way you pull the mines away from the ship and open up a corridor. You need to do it from several directions to ensure there is no mine close to the ship. Once that is done go EVA and approach the ship within the corridor. Usually those ships cannot be taken over without hacking into it: Look for a sparkling thing near the bulkhead. Once the ship is yours make sure it's hull is maximum (use repair laser otherwise). Then enter the ship and fly fast away (TM?) along the corridor.

Good luck!

Cheers Euclid

[Nort The Fragrent]

What a waist of time !

Better to wait till latter in the game, a buy one.

Save all that trouble ! frustration, disappointment, and hair loss.

[BelatedHero]

You could also not destroy the engines so the ship remains in motion and not clustering the mines. I will sometimes not destroy the engines at all. If you need the ship to stop, when the engines have less than 30% HP they will become inoperative. An inoperative engine will repair much faster than a destroyed one. A ship only needs one engine to move, so if the ship has multiple engines, destroy all but one then keep the last one below 30%. It will repair within a minute or two, so the stop is temporary. If you want it to stop again, damage it down again.

I have boarded hundreds of ships. It is one of my favorite aspects of the game. I have reached the conclusion that not every ship is a worthy target though. Don't let any specific ship be your "white whale" and consume you emotionally. Pick another target. You could spend hours on one ship, when in the same time you could have gotten two other targets.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Not yet experienced mines but a whole lot of MK1 and MK2 laser towers. Up until recently a lot of L pirate ships did not have missiles, now they all seem to be better equipped.

If a ship starts chucking out a whole load of laser towers I sometimes just kill it. Other times I let the local patrols take care of the laser towers.

Similar thing with the engines. These are normally my first target. But they are the first thing that gets repaired, let the ship fly for a bit to clear the hazards.

[Falcrack]

The title of this thread makes me think of a capital ship slowly tearing itself apart in order to harvest metals used in its original construction.