Pirates hacking your stations

[Khryshain]

I might be missing something here but one mechanic that is really bugging me at the moment is when a pirate hacks your station and a good percentage of your wares float off into space. I actually like the mechanic but what I'm not keen on is that there is nothing you can do to guard or work against it. I know now that I should have my bases in a non-pirate system but it's a little late for that. As I tend to build mainly multi ware factories, my losses are severe and the only thing I can see to do about it is park a number of large freighters around the bases with the instruction to collect drops and then return it to the station.

It's a lot of micro-managing and is becoming a time waster. Is there nothing that can be done to cut the losses? One thing I have noticed is that my shipyard never seems to be hacked, it's always my building mats or logistics bases that are targeted. All bases are patrolled by fighters and have plenty of turrets with fire authorization for SCA (Heretic's End).

[LameFox]

Yes, it is annoying. The shallowness of piracy mechanics have been brought up now and then over the years, but it doesn't seem to get any traction.

In terms of working around it, there are three ways I normally look at:

-build in neutral space. Pirates only camouflage if the system has an owner—that's how they know what disguises to use. An ownerless system means you can set a fire override to kill them and just have some ships camp the gates.
-claim the sector. In this case they will disguise, but your police ships can scan them down and kill them.
-build in VIG space. VIG doesn't like competition, they'll handle the scanning and killing for you, very effectively.

[thomasbkdk]

I create a special 'fire authorisation' list where i set it to fire on SCA ruthlessly.
This list i assign to all my stations.
I haven't noticed any floating wares after i started doing that.

[LameFox]

I create a special 'fire authorisation' list where i set it to fire on SCA ruthlessly.
This list i assign to all my stations.
I haven't noticed any floating wares after i started doing that.

I'd be curious whether you've seen them kill any. In the past this didn't work because the station would only fire on a pirate (even an undisguised one) if a ship also had an attack order. I tried it in neutral sectors for a while and was frustrated for so long trying to figure out why my stations never just killed it before it could land. But then I'd send a ship, and as soon as that tried to attack, all the station's guns opened up too...

[thomasbkdk]

I admit i have never actually seen it.
Plus i haven't noticed any reports of reputation loss (as far as i remember, i might just have missed it)

I base it on the fact that I haven't also not seen any floating wares.

[Khryshain]

Thanks for the replies. I must admit, I never thought of police actions.... I never went that route because of the factions hit but it's worth looking into.

PS.... I downloaded a mod called Sector Patrol and just set it to unmask identities on ships ( Not attack). I had ruthless on fire authorization on stations and CAPs and as soon as the ships were identified as SCA, they become part of the scrap resource in the sector. So far, seems to be working.

As a further edit for those who may find it useful.... It's been 24hrs and not one single hack since I set up the patrol whereas before, it was every 15 minutes. I've not had any further SCA ships, the patrols unmasked intruders (exclusively FRF raiders). As soon as the ships were unmasked, they left the system. Not sure of the mechanics behind that but I'm glad I no longer have to micro manage the hacks.

[blackphoenixx]

Building in neutral space + fire override for all stations and military ships is the best option in my experience.
Police can cause issues with other factions because a single NPC ship refusing to be scanned (or jumping through a gate just as your police ship wants to scan) can quickly snowball into a massive war that'll drop your rep to -30 in a hurry.
Though admittedly i haven't tried it in 7.5 yet, there were supposed to be improvements iirc.

But just having a destroyer or two assigned to defend a station seems to scare them off too. Doesn't provide complete protection unfortunately but if the other options aren't available it at least reduces the frequency.

[Khryshain]

yeah, I've had similar issues in the past and pretty much forgotten about using police for that reason. With that little mod, you can select various options (attack/pursue etc). The only one I clicked is 'reveal identity' and didn't set the ship to Police, just Patrol. It seems that is enough to stop the pirates hacking. I can't say that definitely but it's been over 24hrs without a hack so it looks like that so far. I'm not getting any faction rep lost so perhaps it doesn't count as scanning? The patrol reveals a pirate about every 5 mins and nothing negative in the logbook...... so far:)

[LameFox]

After some recent testing I'm now quite sure there are still issues with fire overrides and pirates. Though, from what I recall it worked for ships. Maybe it's possible to gate-camp them, since AFAIK SCA spawn from gates.