All your Jump Beacon are belong to me!

[Jimmy C]

If it's your own beacon, your ship will collect it. If you bump into someone else's beacon, it won't move and you'll damage it (its shields to begin with) that will cause its escorting lasertower to go hostile to you and begin turning to attack you. I suggest making an immediate jump that instant.

[Hwitvlf]

Maybe GLADOS is every ship's core

Exactly!

Xenon ships don't have marines and instead has a fixed defence skill based on the normal marine capacity. For a 20 marine ship this means a skill of 1600 or 16x100 fighting marines

That explains a lot. I was recently boarding a J and had it auto-fail before the Hacking stage with 20 marines, but I think the reinforcements I sent didn't have maxed out fighting skills so the boarding party's overall fighting skill may have been low.

I was able to board a ship with a beacon - barely. The boarding pods landed right before it jumped and the marines barely got through the hull before the shields fried them. The Rapid Response ship was fairly damaged, so while the boarding was in progress, it docked at a shipyard and repaired itself - probably the only reason it didn't get destroyed after it switched to my possession. I sent 21 maxed marines in and only 18 came back...she said she was hit...but would be okay...I guess she was wrong

[Wou]

If it's your own beacon, your ship will collect it. If you bump into someone else's beacon, it won't move and you'll damage it (its shields to begin with) that will cause its escorting lasertower to go hostile to you and begin turning to attack you. I suggest making an immediate jump that instant.

I tried that, the beacon does move if you bump it slowly, preferably with something small like a fighter I guess. And the turret didn't go hostile and even if it did, oh well, accidents happen, sometimes a capital ship just rams a thing or two, that's just how it is.
And also the beacon can be repaired with the suit laser. But still it would take ages to bump into a gate, so I'm just curious if it actually reaches it, would it go through?

[Hwitvlf]

Any chance a tractor beam will attach to a beacon?

I don't think a beacon could be forced through a gate as NPC ships which are not intending to travel, can fly through the gate without going anywhere. I think transit requires an NPC ship to be intending to travel. Still, try it and see! It would be cool if it worked.

Edit: A Boron beacon had respawned around 2km from a gate in my game so I tried it myself. The spacesuit seems to be ideal for moving NPC beacons as it doesn't receive/give damage from the bump. I even glitched inside the beacon while using SETA, making it a huge space-hamster-ball. It doesn't warp through the gate. It just continued straight but I warped to the next sector. Still, a handy technique for moving NPC beacons nearer to a complex!

[Wou]

Any chance a tractor beam will attach to a beacon?

I don't think a beacon could be forced through a gate as NPC ships which are not intending to travel, can fly through the gate without going anywhere. I think transit requires an NPC ship to be intending to travel. Still, try it and see! It would be cool if it worked.

Edit: A Boron beacon had respawned around 2km from a gate in my game so I tried it myself. The spacesuit seems to be ideal for moving NPC beacons as it doesn't receive/give damage from the bump. I even glitched inside the beacon while using SETA, making it a huge space-hamster-ball. It doesn't warp through the gate. It just continued straight but I warped to the next sector. Still, a handy technique for moving NPC beacons nearer to a complex!

Just did the same, pushing the beacon gently with my Kea then repairing it when needed. Same result, won't go through a gate. Oh well, was worth a try.

[Snafu_X3]

I tried that, the beacon does move if you bump it slowly, [...]
And also the beacon can be repaired with the suit laser. But still it would take ages to bump into a gate, so I'm just curious if it actually reaches it, would it go through?

Nice idea, but I expect not.. for the same reason you can't tow/bump unowned ships, asteroids etc thru gates

However, I'm curious: can you use the cagobay hacker despite the shielding (or burn it off with a remote ship using IonDs while hacking) to steal a ship's cargo of its JB? (sorry if this has already been answered above or elsewhere)

[Wou]

However, I'm curious: can you use the cagobay hacker despite the shielding (or burn it off with a remote ship using IonDs while hacking) to steal a ship's cargo of its JB? (sorry if this has already been answered above or elsewhere)

I think the cargobay shielding is just plain unbeatable. You may bring down the ship down to 1% hull, but everything aboard will still be unscratched.
Or am I wrong?

[Jimmy C]

However, I'm curious: can you use the cagobay hacker despite the shielding (or burn it off with a remote ship using IonDs while hacking) to steal a ship's cargo of its JB? (sorry if this has already been answered above or elsewhere)

The purpose of the shielding is to negate the cargobay hacker and equipment damage. Which means you can't steal the item or break the equipment protecting it. It's why I keep asking about ways to negate it for boarding Terran ships.

[Snafu_X3]

Hmm.. so the 'best' method might be a long slog with (eg) IRE fire (to cause lots of (minimal) hull dmg instances & hence random destruction of internals), yes?

[Wou]

Hmm.. so the 'best' method might be a long slog with (eg) IRE fire (to cause lots of (minimal) hull dmg instances & hence random destruction of internals), yes?

yeah, but is there a chance at all? Or is it totally invincible no matter what you throw at it

[Snafu_X3]

yeah, but is there a chance at all? Or is it totally invincible no matter what you throw at it

No idea, sry; however on second thoughts PBEs /may/ do better than IREs due to their faster fire rate, tho their increased hull dmg (even tho minimal) should be watched carefully..

[Hwitvlf]

Cargo Bay shielding offers complete immunity to equipment damage as far as I can tell. I've taken capitals down top 12% hull with PBEs and didn't see any equipment loss.

If I see a Terran capital with protection equipment, I'll try to board it without frying anything and see if it works in FL.

[Artificial]

After 1.2 update some of rapid response ships spawns with builded-in CBS while some started to spawn without. I think, devs planned to completely remove that module from Rapid Response groups, but not finished that they started to do because not found all "tails".

Btw, after 1.2 it feels like some ships behaviour logic became broken for some ships a bit - M7D that devs added keep to became "freeze" time-to-time, partically (with awakaning time-to-time), or completely. Same problem for some M6 and TMs - for me it feels like 20% of universe just decided to stop. And M7Ms started to fly without missiles (while M8 hasn't that issue). Anybody have recipe how it might to be fixed? Killing half of galaxy not looks like adequate solution, and I not sure that it will help.

[Midnightknight]

Not sure killing them will solve the issue, i killed or made many of those ships killed and there are still as many around. So might be my bad luck but i don't think the new spawned ships are spared by this illness. I have also a salvager Chokaro that freeze a lot, it sees those mosquito missiles somewhere, jumps to them and freeze in front without ever collecting them. Sometime it freeze after collecting the wares, sometime it doesn't freeze and sometime he freeze before. Looks really random to me. But it seem it happens a lot more when ships are trying to resuply.

[Artificial]

Yeah, issue escalating. I recently found that even after being killed and replaced ships most of ships keeps to doing nothing. Few hours ago traveled thru Bala Gi's Joy and found sector overfilled with pirate M6s that did literally nothing. All M7D (except Yaki's) keeps to "afk" in the same systems or around that systems where they was killed/captured before. I literally facepalmed when in replacement for argon's M7D that forgot something in sector Eighteen Billion and was captured and destroyed by reverse engineering jumped another Gryphon and standed to "afk" in 2 or 3 kilometers from previoust one's position.

Also, found another weird thing - my ships started to forget tasks assigned to them. For example, Ocelot that I captured in first hours of game after command jump to me sometimes stops to do anything after finishing jump (it fixing with repeating command, but still). Also, I found that captured yaki's M7D that wasn't "afk" keeps to reset mouse control mode.

It feels that I should stop to play the game before (if) devs will make update fixing that bugs because it looks like game will collaps into "afking" soon if I will keep to play.

[Hwitvlf]

I started a new game in 1.2 and have seen three Rapid Response ships with jump beacons so far. All of them had Cargo Shielding and strong marines, but they don't all have a full compliment of marines, nor do they have all the boarding protection equipments.

I found an M1 with Hull Polarizer but no Sentry Lasers so I damaged its hull a lot to minimize the Polarizer. After about 5 jumps, it seemed to stop running long enough to get the marines onboard. I only had about 24 marines and their skills were not great (3 to 5 star). About 8 died, but I got a beacon. It's kind of satisfying to make beacons so hard to obtain as you can get a real sense of accomplishment when you do.

I'm going to try a new strategy next time: quick-train a squad of marines in Mechanical (so they can get through the hull) and send them in as the first wave. Hopefully they'll take out some of the high level enemies before I send in the second wave with my good marines. Machiavelli would be impressed but I wouldn't do such a thing in the real world.

[Borocco]

boarding should actually be easier than Xenon. As you can do multiple attempts. Each attempt will kill off some of the defending marines making the next time easier.
with Xenon, that doesn't help, as the defence is essentially reset each time

Speaking of this i never understood what was the nature of the defense on Xenon ships. I boarded a Xenon P last time with 10 very well trained marines (They all had 90+ in fighting) and they almost all get killed in a few seconds. Even a sentry laser wouldn't do that, and the Xenon ship had none of theses improved defenses.


While we are speaking about boarding, there is also a few weirdness i really don't understand for a long time. Why all my marines suddenly dies when they fail to hack the computer or fail to breach the hull lol? I mean ok they have not the skill, so they abandon the task and come back. But no, 5 marines well trained sent, 4 dies simply cause they can't breach a hull while shields are still down. And it's the same for the core, they killed everyone inside, said all is clear and couldn't hack the core, so they suicide ..? It's really weird to me ^^

For capturing Xenon ships it requires two teams to be send to claim the ship.

If you send only one team of marines to the Xenon capital ship, they may fight through all the decks, but a script will kill them off.
To prevent the insta death of team one by the script you need to send in a 2nd team after team one starts to fight at least at deck 1.

This allows to send in low or cheap marines to trigger the capture and after a few seconds send in your elite marines that will "takeover"
the job. Still, many marines will die. For a Xenon Q i use 20 halftrained marines as cannon fodder, then i send 20 toptier marines as reinforcements
which results in 2-5 Elitemarines to be lost.