Sidewinder Mk ICombat

The Sidewinder Mk I is the ship every commander starts in and the one the game hands back for free whenever you can't afford a rebuy. That free-rebuy property is its entire combat identity: you can throw it at things and lose it without consequence. What you can't do is expect it to trade blows — two small hardpoints, 52 MJ of base shield and 108 armour put it at the very bottom of the combat bracket.

In role terms it sits below the Eagle and Viper line in the small-pad combat tier. The community consensus is unanimous and unsentimental: the Sidewinder is a starter you graduate out of as fast as your credits allow. The one place it genuinely works is a Low RES in a high-security system, where NPC security wings tag and soften targets and you collect a share of the bounty for surviving.

Almost nothing about the Sidewinder favours combat — the honest reasons it can fight at all are situational, not statistical:

• Free rebuy. The single combat-relevant advantage. You can fly recklessly, learn target priority and fixed-weapon aim, and lose the ship with zero credit cost.
• Light and nimble. 25-tonne hull means a tight turn and quick boost — useful for staying behind a single NPC while security forces finish it.
• Lands anywhere. Small pad access to every outpost and settlement, so bounty cash-ins are never far away.
• Two small hardpoints + two utilities. Enough for a pair of gimballed multicannons and a shield booster — the absolute minimum fightable fit.

A free-rebuy starter at the combat floor: just 2×S hardpoints, a size-1 distributor and the weakest shield in the game cap it well below every other small hull, redeemed only by 25 t agility.

The 40/100 headline is a verdict against the combat role's priority-ordered factors. Each factor carries a weight (its share of 100); this hull earns part of each based on how it performs against the whole field. The points sum to the rating.

Both tables rate ships for the combat role specifically. The Sidewinder is the baseline floor of the small-pad combat field; every other hull listed is an upgrade.

Same class — small-pad combat

Every small hull above is a step up, and most are cheap. The Eagle Mk II (more agile, three guns) and the Viper Mk III (fast, four mounts) are the two natural first purchases — both leave the Sidewinder behind for a few hundred thousand credits. Keep the Sidewinder only as your free insurance fallback.

The step up — medium & large combat field

Realistically you skip straight past most of this. A first real combat ship is an Eagle, Viper or Cobra Mk V; a serious one is a Krait Mk II, Python Mk II or Fer-de-Lance; the endgame is the Corvette. The Sidewinder's only enduring job is the one it does for free — being there when you can't afford the rebuy on any of these.

The Sidewinder is free in two senses: it's the ship you start the game in, and it's the one the game gives you back when you can't pay a rebuy on anything else. Buying one outright costs almost nothing (~32k Cr fitted), and it's available at literally every shipyard with no permit, rank or engineer gate. It is a base-game hull — no Odyssey requirement.

Because the hull is so cheap, the cost question is moot: the Sidewinder's value is never its purchase price, it's the zero-consequence rebuy that lets a new commander learn combat without going bankrupt.

The whole build ladder on one screen. For the Sidewinder there is barely a ladder — Initial is a fightable starter, A-Rated is as far as it's worth taking, and Engineered is shown only for completeness (don't actually grind materials for this hull). A-Rated swaps the starter pulse for a second multi-cannon and A-rates the power chain; Engineered applies the standard small-combat tour at trivial grade.

Goal: make the Sidewinder fightable for the price of pocket change. Buy a 1G gimballed multi-cannon for the first small hardpoint and keep the starter 1G gimballed pulse laser on the second — gimballed because you're learning aim, and the multi-cannon sips from the tiny distributor. Add one 0E shield booster on a utility and a heat sink launcher on the other.

Keep the stock Lightweight Alloy bulkhead — military composite isn't worth the credits buy-only. Drop a 2D shield generator into the largest optional slot and a 2D hull reinforcement in the other size-2; leave the four size-1 slots empty. Total spend is well under 100,000 Cr. That's the whole plan — there is no meaningful 'buy-only optimisation' beyond this on a hull this small.

There's very little to A-rate, but if you insist on squeezing the hull before moving on, do it in this order:

• 1Power Distributor 1A. The single biggest fix — lets the two guns fire a little longer before WEP empties.
• 2Shield Generator 2C bi-weave + booster 0A. Faster regen so the paper shield comes back between passes.
• 3Power Plant 2A, Thrusters 2A and FSD 2A. Headroom to run two guns and a shield, agility to stay alive, and range to reach your RES.
• 4Swap the spare pulse laser for a second multi-cannon. Consistent kinetic DPS beats mixing on a distributor this small.
• 5Military Grade Composite bulkhead. Roughly doubles raw hull — the biggest single survivability jump available on the airframe, and the right call once you're committing to a hull-tank fit.
• 6Fill all four size-1 slots — 3× 1D hull reinforcement + 1D module reinforcement. More effective armour from the three HRPs plus core-module protection, in the slots left empty buy-only. (The module reinforcement is not engineerable — fit it as-is.)

Engineering a Sidewinder for combat is shown for completeness only. If you do it, it reuses the standard small-combat tour — no unique blueprints:

Recommended order

• 1Distributor — Charge Enhanced (Dweller). The one roll that meaningfully helps; the rest is polish.
• 2Shield — Reinforced (Lei Cheung) + booster Heavy Duty (Didi Vatermann). Keeps the paper shield up a few seconds longer.
• 3Guns — Overcharged + Corrosive (Tod McQuinn). Squeezes out the hull's tiny DPS ceiling.

Approximate progression across the three states (figures are representative, not exact rolls):

The bump in effective hull comes from the Military Grade Composite bulkhead and three hull reinforcements filling every general slot — but even fully engineered, every number here sits below a basic Eagle or Viper. The progression exists for completeness — the practical takeaway is that no amount of investment turns the Sidewinder into a real combat ship.

• It's your free insurance ship. Whenever you can't afford a rebuy, the game gives you a stock Sidewinder — so there's always a reason to keep the name parked in storage.
• Lands on every pad. Small-pad access to all outposts and settlements; handy as a cheap shuttle even after you stop fighting in it.
• Don't over-invest. The temptation to 'just engineer it a bit' is a credit and material trap. The correct spend ceiling is a couple of guns and a shield booster.
• Great teacher. Flying something this fragile forces good habits — lateral thrust, never flying straight at fixed weapons, managing pips — that pay off in every later ship.
• Not an AX or CZ platform. It cannot mount the weapons or carry the tank either role demands; it will die instantly in both.