So, I recently committed to more violence in my game after seeing Broken Moon mess with my good ally, Nema Heavy Works. I'm not at war with Broken Moon, but instead just opted to use the contract system to help NHW out. The contract system seems to shield the player from overt ire with respect to the target of said contract (which is kind of creepy, if you think about it), though your standing still does go down. And so, if corporate warfare is the way of the future, I might as well loot them while depriving them of the ability to fight, right?

And so, I loaded up my Orca with flak cannons for swatting fighters, and light harpoons for bagging game. Ghouls are fun to fly, but they are also first to die, and Broken Moon has a... few, not a lot, but a few of them. After mailing my radar-proximity-fused packages to their recipients, I swept in, and skewered my prizes. The game let me know they were harpooned, and that there was some sort of neutrality something that was being breached here, but they were still destroyed in the fighting, so what's the deal, right?

I won the fights, stayed in the sector the day after, and... no prizes. So, for those who know, do you actually have to be at war for harpoons to work? Might be a good thing to know, especially if you could be fitting that extra hardpoint up with something more useful in a broad context!

*Cough*

So here's a thing. Some of the combat missions seem to have some odd quirks about them.

For instance, if you opt to do the "destroy military assets," or however it goes, by X amounts of points, you're basically at war with another corporation without actually being at war. I think these missions are a bit bugged, to be honest, as you literally HAVE TO destroy something, not just immobilize it or capture it. It frankly feels like murder, and I don't think I'd be willing to play one of those missions again. As long as the mission is hot, however, anything you can bag with a harpoon is going to be yours so long as you wait out the day.

For the defense missions, it seems the coding was not so friendly to player-based harpooning. If you let your fleets take care of the commotion, however, it does seem that they can bag enemy assets. Might need some more observations on this.

...Part of the issue might have been that a destroyed ship may or may not be able to be recovered. That might be the next thing I need to try when I get an opportunity.

Thanks for that info!

I'm still in the "friend of all" phase, and shortly before the "cold war" phase ("This? This is a *research* station. Don't worry about it."). Thus, I'm pretty interested in your findings.

The forums seem dead, and I just wanted to show that there are still a few souls reading it. ;)