Question: The Pelican in the Hatikvah plot

[thedavid]

I am planning to redo the Hatikvah plot in my new playthough of the game. The bottleneck for me is the Scale Plate Pelican. I never just sabotage the ship. I always board it and I level up my marines to be able to take the ship without casualties.

I always do Hatikvah before the HQ so I won't have access to the Martial Arts school.

The problem for me is that for this particular ship, the crew never abandon ship. No matter if the ship is already docked or if I destroy the engines before the ship makes it to the dock. When I scan the ship, it always has the orders to dock at the station.

I used to think that this was just a scripted thing and that the crew would never abandon ship but recently I was attacking a Scale Plate Heron that had orders to dock at the Teladi shipyard. That ship's crew never abandoned ship either. The MIN showed up and destroyed it after I had been pounding on the thing for over an hour with zero crew abandoning ship.

So I want to ask, does the the fact that a ship has an order to dock interfere with the crew's ability to abandon ship?

If so, if I destroy the dock that the ship is heading for but will never reach, because I destroyed their engines, does that cause the ship's orders to change to something like "escape battle" so that the crew can then abandon ship?

[Alan Phipps]

I'm fairly sure that any crew bailing is disabled during critical order situations such as certain missions, and while docking, docked or undocking - possibly during in-space ware transfers too.

I have also noticed that the mini-bail chances seem to greatly reduce or disappear when a ship is 'withdrawing from battle' and making its way directly to a station to escape at a dock, even though it does not yet have exact docking orders. That last *might* just be coincidence or frustrated desperation on my part.

[dtpsprt]

I am always capturing the Pelican and with no casualties too. Just let it dock, have the sabotage done and board it afterwards. The only (very easy) thing to keep in mind is to have Marine Strength above the Pelican's. And don't worry, it will stay there for a very looooooong time.

EDIT: In case you didn't get it, you don't have to shoot at it or do anything else or disable anything. Just get close and let loose your Marines with "Very Strong" - "Very Strong"...