Heresiarch said:
So, I've tried to play as the game intended to - win the race, and sell medicine to the system with plague - and 70% of the time when I go bring the medicine to the port, pirates will show up and intercept me (How is that even possible? Intercepting a 1000+ KM/S spaceship? Is that really how Newtonian physics works?)
Yes.
Intercepts are actually fairly simple.
Ships in Frontier generally ignore things like Hohmann transfer orbits and such, because they can - they are fusion powered torchships, with insane delta-v budgets and very high maximum accelerations. They don't need to bother with fuel conservation, so the common way to travel is accelerate as long as you can, then start decelerating as late as you can afford to without buzzing past your destination or causing a mass extinction event by cratering at several percent of c - typically, "as late as you can afford to" means about half of the way if you fly on manual and are willing to flip your ship and travel the remaining distance backwards while braking at full burn, much earlier than half of the way if you're braking with retros, as it's typically done by the autopilot. This simplifies things a lot.
Your typical pirate will notice your arrival cloud about week prior to your arrival and do their best to come close before you come through. There is also possibility of following a ship from another system using hyperspace cloud analyser to determine the destination. In any case, a pirate will usually lie in wait not far from your hyperspace exit. In such situation, where the interceptor starts roughly behind the interceptee, an intercept is trivial as it's pretty much reduced to 1D work - the interceptor just needs to catch up with you. If you have weaker acceleration, they can simply accelerate slightly faster than you, then reduce overall acceleration gradually to match velocities when they match position. If you have higher acceleration, situation is harder, but still simple - they just have to wait till you start braking and match velocities as you're slowing down. In any case, your trajectory is rather predictable and intercept boils down to finding a spot along your trajectory where you will be travelling at such moment in time and velocity that the intercepting ship can also achieve in the smae moment in place - it's not too different from intercepting an inert object, and only I-War 2 AI can't do that.
Given enough delta-v (Frontier ships just have enough delta-v period) intercept WILL happen, unless you accelerate
and brake aggresively enough that the pirates can't match speed before you land. The bad news is that the pirates can match speed, because they tend to not fly in heavy freighters. If you really want to try, buy a Falcon or Osprey and fly full manual, no autopilot - maybe you will lose some of the more sluggish ships this way - lighter fighters will catch you anyway.
So, you WILL get raped.
Intercepts from other directions are possible, but more difficult, as you'll also have some serious lateral velocity to cancel out or will be travelling head-on which means that you will not only have to match velocities, but to cancel out your velocity first. This generally requires fast ship. In FFE there is certain interface oversight making it harder - system map doesn't show other vessels, so your only chance of intercepting a distant ship, is locking on their arrival cloud before they arrive - target lock should switch to the arriving vessel automatically. In FE2 it was simple, as you could pick up ships from across the system (and observe their trajectories - that's how I can be sure that pirates just don't pop up from the thin vacuum, but actually intercept you, according to and limited by the laws of physics, including gravity - they only appear to teleport at high time compression as the engine cheats a bit then, during final approach, because if engine ticks are tens of minutes apart it would be impossible to intercept anything, including planets).
http://www.alioth.net/ajn/Intercepts.html <-guide to intercepts in FFE.
Now that I have explained why it is impossible to avoid rape in FFE, it's time to provide some pointers to fighting the rapists off.
and blast me to smitheres. How the heck am I supposed to surive? Buy shields and bigger guns to fight them properly? This is the first time I've got so frustrated by pirates in a space sim. Elite fanbois like DraQ plz help.
No Mr Bond, they expect you to die.
Yeah, as you noticed fighting in FFE can be unforgiving. Sure, if you're good, you can pop a swarm of pirates with 1MW pulse in starting craft without breaking a sweat, but to become good, you need to learn, and getting blown about 1s after alarm sounds is not much of a learning experience. Good way to maximize survival chances is to turn about 90 degrees away from enemy line of fire and accelerate away till they fly by. Then you'll have several seconds to actually determine who, how many and from what direction. If you know the direction of the enemy craft, you can try accelerating towards it and to the side, so that you move away from their line of fire, but closer to them. But don't just buzz past - turn and try to scorch them a little bit - if you have fast craft (and beginning ship is quite fast) you can even stick to their tail. They will have serious problems shaking you off as trying to spin and face you will inevitably mean temporarily showing you broadside which is much easier target.
Of course, then there are missiles - contrary to what Fowyr says they can be deadly (though I know a guy who just casually avoided five missiles at once till they ran out of fuel - while under fire, of course), your best chance if you have no ECM, no chaff and less than 3-5 shields is trying to always accelerate towards the centre of missile's turning arc. In about a minute or so it should run out of fuel and self destruct.
Missiles, were rather pathetic and stupid in FE2 (meaning you generally only used them against large ships or to temporarily drive attackers away) though the AI could use them surprisingly well (meaning firing them nearly point blank, and at the moment when you were least likely to evade), unlike how it used lasers.
In FFE, however, the AI is much smarter and more accurate and so are the missiles.
One more hint - if you're a good shot, you can try ignoring beam lasers and focusing on upper end pulse lasers. They require pinpoint accuracy (especially the mining lasers which isn't really meant to be a weapon and fires sloooowly), but they can hit hard, are much lighter than beam lasers of equivalent power (more shields/cargo) and don't force you to keep the enemy in your sights all the time.
Finally - use JJFFE, not vanilla FFE. JJFFE can run on modern machines and fixes many unfixed bugs and problems. FFE was pretty much alpha on release - after extensive patching and Braben suing the living crap of the publisher it ended up as mid-beta. Still not good.
gentleman I am.
