Just spend the better part of an hour making a ship bail...

[johnstreutker]

I have a situation similar to this that I believe has to be a bug. I'll upload the save to see if anyone else can get this ship intact. I got this Prometheus down to 3% hull and upon ejecting the ship would pop, so I read around and found out about scuttle damage, so I waited for it to repair and kept putting pressure on at 10% increments (whenever the pilot bails, the ship pops) until it repaired to 70% because there's no chance above that... At 69% the ship is destroyed when the pilot ejects. Something has to be broken.

Pause as soon as you load in, he's a few km directly ahead.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-UifaZ ... drive_link

[Alan Phipps]

Split from a 2 year dormant thread. A ship can potentially lose some crew when hit while at or under 74% hull with low/no shields.

There seem to be two different bail outcome scenarios: one where the current hull is reflected in the bailed ship with maybe just a bit of further 'scuttle' damage, and one where the ship will always lose most equipment and the hull go to a low figure that is the same every time that ship bails even after reloads. I suppose in theory that low hull figure could be close to zero such that further scuttle damage might kill the ship. See this thread.

[Mookau]

I have a situation similar to this that I believe has to be a bug. I'll upload the save to see if anyone else can get this ship intact. I got this Prometheus down to 3% hull and upon ejecting the ship would pop, so I read around and found out about scuttle damage, so I waited for it to repair and kept putting pressure on at 10% increments (whenever the pilot bails, the ship pops) until it repaired to 70% because there's no chance above that... At 69% the ship is destroyed when the pilot ejects. Something has to be broken.

Pause as soon as you load in, he's a few km directly ahead.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-UifaZ ... drive_link

In all likelihood, this is not a bug. You will need to check the skill level of the pilot to be sure.

BUC Prometheus' can be loaded up with very skilled crew, and it just so happens that if the captain of a ship is at max skill (a full 5 stars in both piloting and morale) then scuttling the ship when they bail will always blow it up.

[LameFox]

Yeah, this is common with those ships due to the crew skill. The system starts to feel very weird at high skill levels, you can have a ship fleeing combat and begging you not to kill it for ages, but at the same time unwilling to give up when it has CLEARLY failed to win the fight or escape. Very mixed signals.

They're not worth the time, if they don't bail in a few minutes blow it up and collect the loot then find another one.

[BitByte]

When speaking from M-size ships it rarely occurs pirates like BUC or YAK gives up in few minutes. Main reason for this is because their ships are fully loaded with crew (13 to BUC and 10 to YAK) and bailing occurs in patches by 3 crew members per cycle (which does not make sense because if you scan the escape pod there's 4 crew members because the pilot of pod). This takes time until the ship is so low with crew (2-4) that they bail out and abandon the ship. If you scan the ship before start shooting it and make it hostile you can monitor all the time how many crew members are still in the ship.
Sometimes it feels even the most stubborn pilot (1-2 stars) with similar crew is not willng to give up when no change to survive. I have even seen YAK ship which does not have single shield nor weapon and still they are not willing to give up until longer fight (which is much harder when no shields and your goal is to keep ship alive).

[grapedog]

most of the time the ship you're trying to cap won't respond to hails, but they do occassionally, and can occasionally be convinced to bail.

Just today in a vanilla game, updated to current, i had a prometheus with a 4+ star cap, and full crew... took about 5 minutes to get them down to 6 crew. During that 5 minutes or so, i was able to comm the captain twice, telling them to surrender. The first time they said hell no, and so I whittled them down a bit. The 2nd time I was able to comm them, they had 6 crew left, and I told them to surrender and they did bail finally... but they busted up a bunch of systems before they did. But I didn't have to wait around for the final two bails. So it can happen, you just gotta send them comm signal every 30 seconds or so... i got through twice in like 5 minutes.