GOVT vessels

[AncientSion]

The Bootypedia reads that GOVT vessels are easily recognizeable by their red flashing lights on the vessels.
Yet when you encounter such a vessel in air mode, they look like a normal trader, academy, whatever vessels.
I regularly shoot down GOVT gold transports or GOVT excavation parties because i cant see if they are faction or govt (no Transcoder yet).

One solution would be to alter the shipping sprites and add red lights to them, like the bootypedia suggests. That way, i can just disengange instead of following, landing and retreating upon seeing MP.

[legionof1]

This Is believe is by design. Those missions not on government specific ships, which do have the described lights, are ment to be difficult to deduce without the decoder.

However on such co-opted ships only the specifically government units inflict negative score and only when killed.

[Cristao]

I noticed this as well. Normally they do have red and blue lights on them. In the past versions, this was so. But however on the recent versions (after I restarted) there is no difference when you look at the vessel during intercept. It is often a waste to land and then spot military police/govt agent and then take off.

[legionof1]

part of what i was talking about is that its not necessary to abort a run against government ships if you have a reasonable means of capture available. About 50/50 killed to captured ratio of government units is usually a net positive score.

[Eddie]

Goverment units give you more negative score if you capture them. To reduce the negative score, killing them is better.

[legionof1]

  not according to what i've played. Perhaps certain units have more dramatic values or their is some adjustment on difficulty but ive manged scores of 10-30 positive on government runs many times. 

[Cristao]

How? As Eddie said, killing and capturing them gives negative scores. Capturing is worse than killing them. So how did you get positive scores while attacking a govt vessel?

[Dioxine]

You don't get hit by negative score for recovering their corpses.

Also, there was no change between versions. Govt ships always have these lights. However, govt forces sometimes use civilian/nondescript ships (gunboats, mining ships). In the latter case, shooting a ship down gives you positive score as normal. Once you've landed by crash site and realized your mistake, you can simply leave, netting you a positive score (++ for craft, 0 for mission).

[Arthanor]

If the craft contains valuable loot and you have good means to control enemies, you can go in, grab stuff (gold?) and get out. As long as you don't kill/stun all enemies, the mission will continue.

So if you stun all but one (kept awake, preferably without weapons from being stunned, disarmed and revived), you can manually haul all the loot in the Bonny (armors, gold, weapons, even destroy the engines to grab the fuel), then "abort mission" will not count the stunned enemies since you did not recover them. You will only get the positive score for grabbing items.

This is more manageable once you have decent weapons and gals, and on small crafts, but provided they aren't armed with heavy or advanced weapons, it should be doable. And it's an interesting change of pace, trying to subdue but not kill people and taking off with the loot.

[Boltgun]

Just stun and kidnap a few enemies for research or money to recover the cost, you can easily take a few negative points and they have good ransom values.