Space Combat — Controls, Weapon Choice, and Dreadnoughts
You can kit out a ship perfectly and still never get behind anyone if you don’t use the brake. Space combat is decided by controls and weapon choice far more than by gear — and that part is oddly under-documented, even though the game spells it out in its own guide.
Five controls the game itself teaches
These come from the in-game combat guide. Because the game states them directly, they survive patches better than any wiki figure.
1. Braking while turning makes you turn much faster. The game repeats this in two places and most players still miss it. Boost to close, brake to turn — that’s the rhythm.
2. Sitting behind your target increases damage and helps you avoid fire. That’s why point 1 matters.
3. Centring the reticle lands critical hits. The dogfight prompt says so outright.
4. Aim at the lead indicator. Unguided weapons need it.
5. There’s auto-follow in the options menu. It finds and chases targets for you, and a recent update taught it to boost as well.
There is no separate evasive manoeuvre. Boost, brake, and turn is the entire moveset.
Weapons split into shield-breakers and hull-breakers
You don’t need to memorise numbers. Each weapon’s in-game description states its purpose.
| Weapon | What the game says it’s for | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Cyclotron Ballista | Excellent against shields, disables enemy engines | Weak against hull armour |
| Infra-Knife Accelerator | Excellent against unshielded hulls | Overheats fast; sustained fire not advised |
| Rocket Launcher | Long range, very effective on unshielded targets | No effect on shields at all |
| Positron Ejector | Devastating at close range | Reduced effect against shielded targets |
| Phase Beam | Drains energy from enemy shields to recharge your own | Prone to overheating |
| Photon Cannon | General-purpose default | No specialisation |
Which gives you the order:
Strip the shield with the Cyclotron, then break the hull with the Infra-Knife or rockets. Fire rockets at an intact shield and nothing happens.
The Phase Beam is a survival weapon. Draining enemy shields into your own pays off in any fight you have to last through.
For asteroid mining the Positron Ejector is far ahead of everything else. The Rocket Launcher can’t mine at all.
Weapon statistics aren’t reproduced here — the available figures are from a build four years old. The role split above is enough.
Managing your shield
Deflector Shields recharge from Sodium, Sodium Nitrate, or Starshield Batteries. Mid-fight you top them up from the quick menu — the HUD tells you as much.
Out of combat they recover on their own, so the only urgency is during a fight. Canisters dropped by kills also refill them.
Ablative Armour doesn’t count toward the three-of-a-kind limit, making it a free fourth slot for survivability (one may be installed).
Meeting pirates
Get jumped after a warp and a comms request appears on a timer. Three options:
- Bribe them and they move on
- Use a Defence Chit to summon system authorities, bought from station merchants
- Fight
Pirates temporarily disable your pulse engine. To escape you have to survive until it comes back — the HUD warns you while it’s down.
Early on, bribing is usually right, especially with valuable cargo or thin weapons. Fighting, though, yields units, resources, a Pirate Transponder (redeemable at the Mercenaries Guild), and standing with the local race.
Pirate dreadnoughts
You need a freighter for them to appear. They spawn when you warp into three-star conflict systems or outlaw systems.
The HUD walks you through the order:
- Fly beneath the shield and destroy the shield generators — firing from the front just hits the shield
- Hit the fuel rods exposed underneath. That’s the real damage window
- Intercept anti-freighter torpedoes when they launch — this decides your reward
- If it tries to flee, destroy the engines to cancel the warp
Protecting the civilian fleet determines your reward tier.
| Outcome | Reward |
|---|---|
| Destroyed, fleet survives | Substantial bounty + recruit surviving pirate frigates |
| Destroyed, fleet wiped out | Salvage only. No bounty |
| Forced to surrender, then boarded | The dreadnought becomes your capital ship |
| Forced to surrender, tribute demanded | Units |
Ignore the torpedoes and your bounty degrades into scrap. Torpedo interception is effectively how you defend your payout.
Sources conflict on the warp drive. The widely repeated claim is that destroying it forfeits the S-class module reward — but the current in-game text states that destroying the ship after its surrender still pays a large bounty. Which is correct is unverified. If rewards are the goal, boarding or demanding tribute is the safer route.
The Hive of Glass
A boss-tier enemy added in a recent update, structured much like a dreadnought.
- While the core is sealed, target the Radiance Arms — destroying them reduces incoming fire
- Once the central core deploys, hit the core
- If it flees, destroy the engines to cancel the warp
It will attack space stations, the Space Anomaly, and even your own freighter.
Freighter rescue — how the reward gets lost
Clearing the pirates isn’t the end. The captain hails you, and you must land and speak to them on the bridge to collect. It isn’t automatic.
A few traps:
Summon your own freighter nearby and you get nothing. The rescue target becomes your freighter, so no hail, no marker, no reward, however many pirates you kill.
Don’t take your first freighter for free. If you don’t own one, the rescued ship is offered free — but it stays free every time, so the first one is the one where you should demand payment instead.
A recent patch fixed a bug where captains failed to hail the player after a completed battle. If you remember rescuing a freighter and getting nothing, that was the bug.
Sentinels and wanted level
Get wanted in space and Sentinel Interceptors come. Higher levels mean more of them, and at level 5 a Sentinel carrier warps in and spawns waves indefinitely.
The awkward part:
While sentinels are present you cannot use the pulse engine or open the galaxy map. They pursue you into the atmosphere.
Escape routes are clear-cut:
| Method | Effect |
|---|---|
| Enter a freighter or space station | Wanted level resets to 0 |
| Destroy the level-5 carrier | Reset to 0 plus a rare reward |
| Boost continuously in one direction | Outrun them |
| Emergency Warp Unit | Warp straight out of combat |
| Enter the atmosphere | Blocks further waves, but wanted level stays |
Without the firepower to kill the carrier, docking to reset is the answer. Toughing it out just leaves you permanently at level 5.
Outlaw systems
Different rules apply:
- Attack traders and no authorities respond. No sentinel reaction at all
- Highest pirate encounter rate, and the best dreadnought spawn odds
- Contraband is cheap here and sells high in lawful space — but lawful stations run cargo scans
Going in underarmed means the highest encounter rate in the game with no sentinel backup.
When you’re shot down
On normal difficulty you respawn with your ship at the nearest station, and recover cargo from a grave marker. Two risks:
- Pirates can loot it first, in which case it’s gone permanently
- Dying again before recovery overwrites the old grave. Logging out clears the marker too
Survival mode destroys ship cargo permanently and respawns you on the surface. Permadeath deletes the save.
Gear priorities
Commit to one weapon. Upgrades of the same type cap at three per inventory tab, and installing a fourth disables all of them. Spreading across weapons leaves everything mediocre.
For supercharged slots there’s one principle worth knowing:
Supercharge base technology early, S-class modules late.
The bonus from supercharging base tech scales inversely. A beginner ship gains around +20% shield strength from it; a high-end ship gains about +5%. Supercharged Slots covers this in detail.
Never put Launch Thrusters in a supercharged slot — it increases launch fuel consumption instead.
Combat ships
Fighters carry the highest damage bonus (70–90% at S-class), and the game’s own material calls them strong dogfighters.
That said, Sentinel Interceptors (“Salvaged”) have higher manoeuvrability (40–50 vs 35–45), and Exotics are the balanced pick with both damage and shields high. Haulers, conversely, have enormous shields but low damage — not combat ships.
Per-class figures are in Ship Classes and Slot Expansion.
Common mistakes
- Firing rockets or positrons into an intact shield — rockets simply do nothing
- Holding down the Infra-Knife — longest overheat recovery in the game, and the game warns against it
- Attacking a dreadnought head-on — you have to go underneath
- Ignoring dreadnought torpedoes — turns your bounty into scrap
- Having your freighter summoned during a rescue — reward becomes zero
- Installing four of the same upgrade — all of them switch off
- Dying again before recovering your grave — cargo lost for good
- Never braking — slow turns, no rear position, worse damage and worse evasion
Related
- The Nine Starship Types — what each type is for
- Ship Classes and Slot Expansion — per-class numbers
- Supercharged Slots — placement principles
- Earning Units — what dreadnought rewards are actually worth