The best place to shoot down enemies

[Delian]

Sometimes, it's possible to choose where you down a shipping. This can be important because it allows you to avoid negative environments like hot and cold.

The terrain texture on the globe decides what kind of a map the ground battle takes place on. So a good idea is to either wait until a shipping is over a particular kind of texture, or possibly direct the shipping there.

I've attached an image which shows all the possible terrain textures, the ones on top are zoomed in, the ones on bottom are zoomed out. Underneath is a description and a chance of temperature-related environment effect. As you can see, if you down a shipping on the right terrain, you can be safe from having to bring gear to counter these environments.
Note that, even if you shoot down the shipping on a safe terrain, you can still get a bad roll and get a Nuke Zone map, which drains freshness unless your armor and plasma resists are high.

There are also further benefits. Some terrains can spawn rare magazines, even gold bars, but I'd argue the most rewarding are orchards with Apples. Terrains with a relatively good chance to get apples on are: The three Habitation terrains and Steppe, while Desert, Arid and Tropic have a small chance. Other terrains won't yield apples, but they have a small chance to spawn a crashed Necroplane, which would yield some Necroplane Parts. In terms of rewards, I think the best terrain is Medium Habitation, while the worst is Swamp.

[Vakrug]

So actual latitude have no effect. As I expected.

[gunderson]

Super interesting info, which dovetails into something I've been wondering about quite a bit lately: aside from starting as Iron Tribe, are there any more-or-less guaranteed sources of necroplane parts?  I incorrectly assumed that shooting down low-level planes would have necroplane parts, and now I'm wondering if they're like staplers rather than a chance box for 14mm stuff in that they're just fairly rare drops that gate the airgame tree.  I know that some maps can randomly spawn with necroplane parts, but it's mid-may in my game and I've yet to see a single one.

[Delian]

Necroplane or Thunderbolt are common in the early game and shooting them down will always yield those parts. The Megascorpion Hunt and Shipwrecked Gal mission sites also have a good chance to get them. Otherwise, Sea Ice terrain has the highest chance (1 in 6).

[Psyentific]

That matches my observations; extreme-cold terrains like Ice tend to spawn plane wrecks more than anywhere else. The B-17 Necroplanes full of Necropirates are the most reliable source of plane parts in my experience. While the Thunderbolt bandit fighters are plentiful, each one only yields about 4 necroplane parts so you'll need to salvage a lot in order to reconstruct anything.

[gunderson]

Thanks for the advice on finding necroplane parts.  I eventually had some luck, but it ended up just being that I downed a shipping on some ice and picked up 20-ish parts.  In practice, I think the Little Bird just isn't a great necroplane part hunter, since the most reliable target with them that it can down is the sand crawler, which is kinda a pain to deal with and only drops 4 necroplane parts.  Thunderbolts just run away when they take enough damage.  And when you've finally got some decent light weapons and a craft that can use them, it's not really a big deal to get the parts unlock anymore (though picking up a bunch of them still seems difficult).

In practice, I think I'd classify necroplane parts more like medical supplies: provides a useful unlock, you need a pretty big pile to do much of anything useful with them in the early game, but you can buy some soon enough that you might never need to hunt for more than the first one.