OK, I am officially done. Headquarters acquired and deployed. I can now reverse engineer ships and build my own. But to what end?
Learning how to board ships by spacewalking marines from the Vidar was a ton of fun. Frustrating at first, but after many tries, it's become second nature. I used a Cobra M7M for the final boarding operation on the target TL. Its heavy torpedoes and flails are a real kick. But you can't launch them against a friendly target. Well, the HQ plot target starts friendly. :/ Good thinking Egosoft. The Cobra has no lasers except on the back turrets. Drama! So I had to get in front of the target Orca and jump into the back turrets to manually fire against it enough to annoy it enough to become an enemy so I could fire torpedoes (and pods) for boarding. Then jump back into the pilot seat and turn around to fire torpedoes and eventually the boarding pods, while taking nasty damage from the Orca. I was planning on doing this operation safely from a distance originally, but lasers have very short ranges. :/ Many folks use multiple ships for boarding - some remotely operated to get friendly target hostile by shooting it with lasers, and then shootig it to get the shields down and keeping them f=down while your piloted main is used to launch marines. I never needed to get that sophisticated. I really don't trust the AI to control my ships during combat while in sector. Out of sector is another thing though.
Anyway... My 20 marines with attributes of 80 or more in fighting boarded easily in pods, but I had to cover them before and after with flail barrages to keep them from getting shot en route. They cleared all 6 decks of the Orca without a single casualty; no reloads needed once I had 20 starting hull cutting. I think doing 18 boardings ahead of time to train them up was a bit overkill. Well, it was fun. I am tempted to try boarding some of the rarer unbuyable and harder large capital ships now that I have 20 eXtreme marines, but I must move on... Damn addicting game.
Good luck with that. And don't forget to re-play X3:TC with the DDTC mod. Taking the Orca is one thing but taking it with a super star destroyer filled with cylon fighters is quite another.
MIND THE GAP! I guess that's what that station announcer has been worried about all this time!
There's a HUGE mod available for X3:Albion Prelude called Litcube's Universe. Take a look at this feature list! https://code.google.com/p/litcubesuniverse/wiki/04_Features It's got me drooling a lot more than waiting for Egosoft to try and get Rebirth to work right.
