Guides // Activities

Combat

Bounty hunting, Resource Extraction Sites, and Conflict Zones — earn credits while you learn to fight.

Before You Fight

Combat is the one career where the galaxy fights back, and the only one where a bad session costs you money instead of making it. The good news is that it is also the most forgiving to learn, because early on the system authority will do the dangerous half of the work while you collect the bounty.

The rule that matters more than any build advice: never fly without the rebuy (The insurance excess to get your ship back after it explodes — about 5% of hull and modules.). If you cannot pay the insurance on your ship twice over, you are not ready to take it into a fight. Check the rebuy figure in the right-hand panel before you launch.

Shield Generator

Your health bar. Hull damage is slow to repair and permanent in the field; shields regenerate for free. A bigger shield beats a bigger gun for anyone still learning.

Power Distributor

The most underrated combat module. It decides how fast your weapons, engines, and shields recharge. An undersized distributor means you run dry mid-fight and simply stop shooting.

Shield Boosters

Utility mounts. Cheap, light, and each one is a straight percentage on top of your shield. Fill spare utility slots with these before anything exotic.

Chaff Launcher

Breaks the target lock of gimballed and turreted weapons pointed at you. Limited ammunition, so fire it when you are actually being hit, not on approach.

Heat Sink Launcher

Dumps heat instantly. Essential if you fly plasma or rails, and a useful escape tool — a cold ship is much harder to track.

Kill Warrant Scanner

Optional. Reveals bounties from other jurisdictions and can multiply a payout several times over. Not required to get paid, but it is close to free money at a busy site.

These are the hulls built for shooting things. Work up the list — a medium ship you can afford to lose teaches you more than a large one you cannot.

Ship	Class	Price	Description	Build
Kestrel Mk II	Small	13.8M CR	A small-pad firepower monster. Extremely agile with heavy firepower for its size, but unforgiving if you make mistakes.	EDSY
Fer-de-Lance	Medium	51.2M CR	A premier medium combat ship and one of the classic PvP duelists. Fast, agile, and built around concentrated firepower.	—
Python Mk II	Medium	64.7M CR	A brutal medium combat platform with exceptional firepower. One of the best choices for serious PvE combat.	EDSY
Federal Corvette	Large	183.2M CR	The large-pad PvE combat benchmark. Enormous firepower, strong defenses, and excellent maneuverability for its size. Requires Rear Admiral rank with the Federation.	EDSY

Do not fit a combat ship for maximum damage. New pilots consistently over-gun and under-tank. If you die with ammunition left, the problem was never firepower.

Weapons and Damage

Almost every fight is two fights stacked together: strip the shield, then break the hull. Different weapons are good at each, which is why mixed loadouts beat pure ones.

Weapon	Damage type	Best against	Notes
Pulse Laser	Thermal	Shields	Cheap, power-efficient, forgiving. The default beginner shield-stripper.
Burst / Beam Laser	Thermal	Shields	More damage than pulse, far more heat and distributor draw. Beams melt shields and your capacitor.
Multicannon	Kinetic	Hull	Reliable, low heat, uses ammunition. The standard hull-breaker.
Cannon	Kinetic	Hull	Slow, heavy-hitting projectiles. Rewards good aim.
Plasma Accelerator	Absolute	Both	Enormous burst, ignores most resistances. Punishing to aim, brutal on power and heat.
Rail Gun	Thermal + Kinetic	Modules	Pierces shields to damage modules directly. Disables a target rather than deleting it.
Missiles / Torpedoes	Explosive	Hull	Good against big slow targets. Countered by point defence and chaff.

Fixed, gimballed, or turreted

Fixed

Fires exactly where the nose points. Highest damage, no tracking, immune to chaff. The competitive choice, and the hardest to learn.

Gimballed

Tracks a locked target within a small cone. Slightly less damage, far more forgiving. Defeated by chaff, and it will not fire accurately without a target lock. Start here.

Turreted

Tracks independently and fires on its own. Lowest damage by a wide margin, but it works while you are busy flying. Useful on large multi-role hulls, wasted on a fighter.

A good beginner loadout: gimballed pulse lasers to drop the shield, gimballed multicannons to open the hull. It is unglamorous, cheap to run, and it will carry you all the way to a Hazardous site.

Flying the Fight

Ship handling decides more fights than weapon choice. These are the habits worth building from your very first engagement.

Manage your pips

Your six pips (Power Distributor Pips: Six units of capacitor power split between SYS, ENG, and WEP. No group takes more than four.) should never sit still in a fight. Push WEP while you are landing damage, slam SYS the moment you are the one being shot, and dump everything into ENG when you need to escape. This single habit separates pilots who survive from pilots who do not.

Fly slow, not fast

Turn rate peaks in the blue section of your throttle. Pinning the throttle forward makes you fast and wide; sitting in the blue zone (The blue band on the throttle where your ship turns fastest. Not the same as the landing approach band.) lets you out-turn almost anything. Most new pilots fly far too fast to ever get their nose on target.

Learn reverse thrust

Throttle to zero and apply reverse thrust while keeping your nose on the target. You drift backwards while continuing to fire, which forces an aggressive opponent to overshoot repeatedly. It is the single most effective PvE (Player versus Environment: Flying against ships nobody is piloting, rather than against other commanders.) trick there is.

Boost to break a firing solution

When an enemy lines up on you, boost. The sudden change in speed throws off both NPC (Non-Player Character: A ship or person nobody is flying — crew, security, pirates, and traffic.) aim and gimbal tracking. Boost also gets you out of a bad merge (The head-on pass at the start of a dogfight, where both ships cross.) faster than turning will.

Use chaff deliberately

Chaff blinds gimbals and turrets for a few seconds. Fire it when you are taking sustained fire, then reposition while they cannot track you. Against fixed weapons it does nothing at all.

Know your exit

If shields are down and the hull is dropping, leave. Four pips to ENG, boost away, and high-wake (Leaving by hyperspace jump to another system. Nothing can follow you through it.) to another system — low-waking (Dropping back into supercruise instead of jumping. The same ship can interdict you again.) to supercruise can be interdicted, a hyperspace jump cannot be followed. There is no shame in it; a rebuy costs more than a retreat.

Scan before you shoot. Firing on a Clean ship makes you the criminal — you pick up the bounty, the station turns hostile, and system security comes for you. Wait for the target to resolve as Wanted before you touch the trigger.

Where to Find Combat

This is the part most guides skip. Knowing how to fight is useless if you cannot find anything to fight. Every site below is a different difficulty and a different payout — work down the list as your ship and your hands improve.

Nav Beacons

Every populated system has one, and it is always listed in the navigation panel. Traffic passes through constantly, security is present in high-security systems, and the pirates are small. This is where you learn to shoot without paying for the lesson. Scan ships until one comes up Wanted, then help the authority kill it — you only need to land some damage to claim the bounty.

Resource Extraction Sites

Resource Extraction Sites (Resource Extraction Site: A spot in a planetary ring where miners work and pirates hunt them. Comes in four intensities.) are found in the rings of planets in populated systems. Drop into a ring and the available sites appear in the navigation panel. Pirates hunt miners here, and system authority hunts pirates — which means you can let security tank while you collect vouchers.

Site	Security	Who it is for
Low Intensity RES	Present	First real combat after Nav Beacons. Sparse spawns, small ships.
RES (standard)	Present	A step up in traffic, same forgiving security backup.
High Intensity RES	Heavy	The beginner sweet spot. Dense spawns and a lot of security — big bounties, most of the risk absorbed for you.
Hazardous RES	None	No authority at all. Large wings (A group of up to four commanders flying together and sharing mission credit.) of serious ships. Bring an engineered hull and a real shield.

High RES (Resource Extraction Site: A spot in a planetary ring where miners work and pirates hunt them. Comes in four intensities.) is the best beginner value there is. The security wings pull aggression and do the heavy lifting, but bounties are shared with anyone who contributed damage. You get large-ship payouts at small-ship risk.

Compromised Nav Beacons

A Nav Beacon (Navigation Beacon: The traffic marker every populated system carries. Scan it for system data; loiter for easy bounties.) whose security link has been knocked out. You will see “System Link Error: Security response unavailable” on the HUD when you arrive — meaning no authority will ever show up, for you or for the pirates. Spawn rates are higher than a Hazardous RES, with more variety and more wings, and the bounties on offer are large.

How to find one: they appear in systems under Civil War or Lockdown states. Drop at the system's normal Nav Beacon and scan it to download system data, and the compromised variant shows up as a signal source. They do not appear in the nav panel until you are within about 1,000 Ls (Light-Second: Distance inside a system. A station 200,000 Ls out is a long supercruise, jump range be damned.).

Conflict Zones

Faction warfare. These spawn in systems at War or Civil War — filter for those states in the Galaxy Map to find them. You pick a side on arrival and are paid in combat bonds rather than bounty vouchers, redeemed with the faction you fought for.

Intensity	What spawns
Low	Competent ships, no objectives beyond winning the zone. A fair first conflict zone.
Medium	Tougher mix, plus Spec Ops wings (A group of up to four commanders flying together and sharing mission credit.) and War Zone Correspondents as bonus targets.
High	The hardest ships you can meet, Enemy Captains, and Capital-class megaships. Engineered ships only.

Conflict zones exist on foot as well, in Odyssey. Ground CZs pay well and need a completely different kit — a Dominator suit and infantry weapons rather than a ship.

Signal sources

Pirate Activity Detected

Threat 3 to 7, most common in Anarchy systems. Threat 7 can spawn seized Capital-class ships — check the threat level before you drop, because it is displayed and it is honest.

Mission signal sources

Threat 3 to 6, generated by whatever mission sent you there. Contents match the mission brief.

Combat Aftermath / Degraded Emissions

Not combat, but worth knowing — these are salvage, and dropping into one expecting a fight wastes time.

Powerplay and Anti-Xeno

Powerplay adds its own combat layer: undermining a rival power means killing their ships in their systems, which is reliable, repeatable, and pays merits toward module unlocks rather than raw credits. Expect PvP (Player versus Player: Fighting other commanders. Only possible in Open Play.) interest in contested systems.

Anti-Xeno (Anti-Xeno: Fighting Thargoids. Needs Guardian or AX weapons — conventional hardpoints barely scratch them.) is a separate discipline. Thargoids are immune to conventional weapons and require Guardian or AX-specific hardpoints, plus a caustic-resistant build. Do not wander into it in a bounty-hunting ship.

Ship	Class	Price	Description	Build
Alliance Chieftain	Medium	18.6M CR	The classic AX interceptor hunter. Excellent agility, hardpoint placement, and hull characteristics make it one of the best ships for learning AX combat.	—
Krait Mk II	Medium	44.2M CR	A heavier AX platform with excellent firepower, more internal space, and a fighter bay. A strong alternative when you want more firepower and staying power.	—

Getting Paid

Combat produces vouchers, not credits. Until you hand them in they are worth nothing, and they die with your ship.

Bounty vouchers

Earned from killing Wanted ships. Redeem at any station belonging to the issuing faction, under Contacts. Bounties are per-faction, so a session at one beacon may leave you with vouchers from several.

Combat bonds

Earned in conflict zones. Redeem with the faction you fought for, at one of their stations. They pay considerably better than bounties at the same difficulty.

Interstellar Factors

Found in low-security and anarchy systems. They will cash vouchers from any faction for a cut, and clear fines and bounties on your own head. Useful when you are far from the issuing faction.

Massacre mission stacking

The highest-paying thing you can do with a combat ship, and it is pure mission bookkeeping. Stacking (Stacking Missions: Taking several contracts with the same objective from different factions, so one run pays all of them.) is what makes it pay. The mechanic: kills count toward every massacre mission you hold, so long as each mission came from a different minor faction.

Take four pirate massacre missions from four different factions, each asking for twelve kills in the same target system, and you kill twelve pirates — not forty-eight — and get paid four times, plus the bounty vouchers you collect along the way. Stack ten and the numbers get silly.

Find a hub

You want one target system with a Hazardous RES (Resource Extraction Site: A spot in a planetary ring where miners work and pirates hunt them. Comes in four intensities.), surrounded by one or two systems containing many stations and many different minor factions. More factions in fewer jumps is the whole trick.

Build reputation first

Payouts scale with your standing with the issuing faction and your combat rank. Allied factions with a high rank top out around 500k per mission. Unfriendly ones will not even offer the good missions.

Take wing missions

Wing massacre missions pay far more and can still be completed solo. Take them whenever they appear.

Grind the target system

Fly to the target system, work the Hazardous RES (Resource Extraction Site: A spot in a planetary ring where miners work and pirates hunt them. Comes in four intensities.), and track kills per faction. Then run the circuit of stations to hand everything in.

Do not mix in war-zone massacre missions. A massacre mission that names a conflict zone will not be satisfied by RES kills, and it quietly breaks an otherwise clean stack. Take pirate ones only.

Watch the mission timer and the rebuy (The insurance excess to get your ship back after it explodes — about 5% of hull and modules.). Failing a stack of missions damages your reputation with every faction at once, which is a slow thing to repair. If the ship cannot survive the target system, take fewer missions.