Boarding is entering a Disabled ship to see what is inside. This includes Derelicts. Plundering system's friendly ships is an unlawful action and you may suffer a minor penalty to your Legal status. Usually, this is lesser than the combined penalty for both disabling and destroying the ship yourself so penalties can be minimized. If your action is observed, authorities in the system may become hostile.
Pirates tend to both disable ships and board disabled ships. If the disabled ship cannot be boarded, they will destroy it instead. After a Pirate has boarded a disabled ship, it cannot be boarded by the player.
If a pirate finds you while disabled, it will board you and steal a fair chunk of your money. You can communicate with it before boarding to Beg for mercy. It will go away for a bribe of a flat fee of your credits which is significantly less than if boarded, which is a percentage of your total credits. This can happen multiple times, so get your ship repaired ASAP. This can be done by asking a passing Trader for help or waiting for the work of your Repair Droids.
Non-Pirate ships will simply destroy any enemies they see, disabled or not.
Operation[]
- Move onto the disabled ship.
- Slow to a stop or near stop.
- Turn to the same line (same heading or tumble).
- Press the Board key, typically B. This stops your ship completely.
Note that if a fight is going on, stray shots may easily finish the ship.
Outcome[]
Once boarded, one of several things may happen :
| Can't board | Says "You can't board this ship." Happens if the ship : • Has already been boarded by the player or a pirate, as it can be done only once. • Is part of a mission you are not following. • Is an escort released then disabled. • Has no crew : Cargo Drone, Wraith, Hyperioid, Krypt Pod and all Vell-os ships. |
| Trap (derelict only) |
Derelict is empty and a hostile pirate fleet will soon hyperjump in. The delay is long enough to run away with a decently fast ship. |
| Rescue (derelict only) |
The derelict crew asks to be carried somewhere. • If accepted, it becomes a passenger ferry mission paying 75k credits. Exploit: If you already have such a mission, new rescues become instead plunders. • If refused, nothing happens and the it may be boarded again for same outcome. |
| Repair (escort only) |
The disabled escort is slightly repaired to be reactivated. |
| Recharge (special) |
This happens mainly with trader Valkyries : Ship emits a call for assistance. If you open communications, it offer 2k credits for recharge. If accepted, it becomes waiting (a bit similar to disabled). Boarding them pays and reactivates them. |
| Plunder | See below. |
Plundering[]
Plundering always happen with disabled enemies (except mission ships) and sometimes with derelicts. You can plunder a derelict if it can't offer its mission to you (because you already have it in your log).
You are shown what is aboard and may attempt to :
- Plunder Energy to refill your own.
- Plunder Cargo to load as much as possible in your ship and escorts.
- Plunder Ammo to transfer expendable outfits if you have the matching weapon and the target has remaining ammunition.
- Plunder Credits to transfer money.
- Capture ship, see Capture.
- Abort to safely end boarding.
Each attempt has a risk of triggering the ship's self-destruct. If not, it is successful and allows another attempt at what is left, with increased risk. You should pick most desirable plunder first.
If the goal is monetary gain, keep in mind that bay fighters are ammo and that captured ships can be sold. Both are worth so much that usually only the heaviest ships carry more in pure credits.
Capture[]
Some boarded ships may be captured. Capture chances are based on your ship, your warship escorts and the target ship's crew and strength stats. This is added to random chance of +/-5%, and cannot be lower than 1% or higher than 5%. The defender has a strong advantage.
The Marine Platoon outfit can raise your crew.
If successful, you can choose to either :
- Make it a free escort ship (if you do not already have 6 escorts).
- Use it as your own, your current ship becoming a free escort refitted with stock outfits. This is not possible if you have no crew. (e.g. Vell-os ships)
Once a ship becomes an escort (by whichever method), it may no longer be swapped with the player's ship, but it may be sold.
Backwards capturing[]
An idea when capturing lesser ships is to take the ship as your own, making your ship an escort. Next, go to a shipyard and buy & outfit a new ship. You now have a good ship and a powerful escort. Note that your ship will lose all its installed non-default weapons as an escort, so this strategy has value only if your ship is a powerful variant. It's also a way to get ships that are usually unavailable or difficult to get as an escort such as the Kestrel, Raven or Aurora Cruiser if you're in the storyline where you can purchase them from the shipyard.
This is an effective way to take advantage of a disabled fighter if you have the money.
Capture Formula[]
The following is straight from the source, Mr. Matt C. Burch.
Matt Burch explanation[]
(Capture odds) is based on relative crew, but relative ship strength plays a role as well. Escorts contribute too, and there is a randomness factor thrown in.
Basically, capturing other ships is based on a set of rules.
To start with, here are some provisos:
- You can't capture ships marked as 'derelict'.
- You can't capture ships if you're not a registered user.
- You can't capture ships (as your own ship) if you're not allowed to have escorts (Vell-os storyline, for example). Capturing as an escort is okay.
First, a value called "Total Strength" is set to your own current ship's strength.
Secondly, a value called "Total Crew" is set to your own ship's inherent crew value, no modifiers applied... yet.
Any non-mission assigned escorts that are combat AI type ships have 10% of their strength and crew added to your own, for capturing purposes only. For example, if I had a crew of 5 on my ship, and I'd already captured a warship with 10 crew, I would have a capturing crew of 6 for any future vessels I tried to board. The same goes for the strength value. As you can see, this implies that the larger and more powerful the ships you have already captured, the greater your chances of capturing further ships... but freighters don't add to your chances at all.
Marines will add either a set value to your crew (say, 10 marines), or a percentage increase to your capture odds. This is where it gets tricky. A "Marines" outfit that adds a set number of crew to your ship will have it's set value added to your Total Crew. However, a "Marines" outfit that gives you a percentage increase to your capture odds adds that percentage to your total calculated capture odds, which includes all your escorts!
Here's the basic algorithm for capture odds:
Capture Odds = (Your Total Crew divided by Your Target's Crew times 10 ) times 100
As you can see, this implies that capturing a ship is very hard; the "home team" has a ten-to-one advantage, if it's just sheer numbers of crew. It's more complex than this, however.
The "capture odds" value now gets modified by any "Marines: Percentage Chance" outfits you might have. It's a straight addition; if your outfit grants you 25% better odds, you get that value added to your capture odds.
Now, we finally get to do something with that Total Strength value we were playing with earlier. If your Total Strength is greater than your target's ship strength times 5 , you get a flat 10% increase to your capture odds. What are you complaining about? You already get a tenth of their crew added to your own.
After all this has happened, your capture odds then get a bit of randomness thrown in, in the form of a plus or minus 5% random value. Cool.
Finally, your capture odds are truncated thusly: if your capture odds are less than zero, you get a flat 1% chance. Hey, it's that stray blaster bolt that hits the captain, you know? If your capture odds are greater than 75%, the odds are truncated back to 75% chance. You can never have a better than 3/4 chance of capturing a ship.
So our final algorithm looks a lot like this:
- Total Strength = your ship's strength + 10% of the strengths of all your non-mission warship escorts
- Total Crew = your ship's crew + %10 of the crew of all your non-mission warship escorts + any "fixed value" marines outfits
- Capture Odds = (Total Crew / (Target Crew * 10)) * 100
- Capture Odds = Capture Odds + any "percentage chance" marines outfits
- If Total Strength > (Target Strength * 5), add 10% to Capture Odds
- Randomly add or subtract up to 5% from Capture Odds
- If Capture Odds < 0, Capture Odds will be 1%
- If Capture Odds > 75%, Capture Odds will be 75%