CombatActivity Guide

"Combat" is not a single activity but a cluster of them, all running on the same flight-and-gunnery engine. The thing that unites bounty hunting, conflict zones, massacre missions, piracy and Powerplay fighting is that you point guns at another ship and apply damage faster than it applies damage to you. The differences are the venue, the payout type, and the opposition — not the fundamentals.

The minute-to-minute loop is always the same four beats:

1. Acquire

   Scan / interdict / target a hostile.

2. Strip shield

   Thermal damage, 4 pips WEP.

3. Break hull

   Kinetic, hold gimbal lock.

4. Survive & bank

   Flip pips to SYS, collect reward.

Where it differs from your other roles: trading and exploration reward route optimisation and patience; combat rewards build correctness and pip discipline. A poorly-built combat ship doesn't lose money slowly — it dies and pays a rebuy. That's why the role is so engineering-hungry, and why it sits at the centre of any combat doctrine.

Six mechanical systems decide every fight. Internalise these and the activities in The Combat Activities become variations on a theme.

The damage triangle (the most important thing)

Every fight has two phases — shield, then hull — and they want opposite damage types. This is the single biggest source of "why am I taking forever to kill things."

Weapon mounts

• Fixed — highest DPS and best projectile speed, but you must aim. Rewards skill; the PvP standard.
• Gimballed — auto-track inside a cone. Lower DPS, easiest to land, but chaff breaks the lock. The PvE workhorse.
• Turreted — track almost any angle, lowest DPS, fire-and-forget. Best on big slow hulls and for gunner-crewed fighters.

The power distributor & pips

You have six pips to distribute across three capacitors, max four in any one:

The combat rhythm is pip-flipping: 4 pips to WEP while you're on target and dealing damage, snap to 4-SYS the instant an enemy is hammering your shield. Doing this well is worth more than any single module upgrade.

Heat

Firing and charging generate heat. Above 100% your ship takes thermal damage; above ~150% modules start to break. Heat sink launchers dump heat instantly; the Thermal Vent experimental on beam lasers dumps your heat into the target every time you fire — the standard fix for hot energy builds. Running cold also makes you harder to target and lets you hide (silent running).

Subsystem targeting

Sub-target an enemy's modules to cripple rather than just delete: kill the Power Plant (forces a malfunction or outright kill), Drives (immobilise), FSD (stop it fleeing), or Power Distributor (starve its guns and shields). Cannons and railguns with high per-shot damage are best for this; it's how you stop a fleeing assassination target or disable a piracy mark without destroying its cargo.

Defences & utilities

NPC rank & the opposition

NPCs carry their own combat rank ladder — Harmless → Mostly Harmless → Novice → Competent → Expert → Master → Dangerous → Deadly → Elite. Higher-ranked NPCs fly better-built ships and pip-flip against you. The reward for a kill scales with the target's danger, so a Deadly Anaconda is both harder and far more lucrative than a Harmless Sidewinder.

The venues, ordered roughly from accessible to advanced. Each rewards a different currency and suits a different stage of the build.

The goal of the early game is to learn the loop cheaply, in a hull you can afford to rebuy, before you sink engineering into anything.

1. Pick a cheap, tough small hull

   A small-pad combat ship such as the Viper Mk IV is fast, durable and cheap to rebuy. Don't engineer it yet; learn in it. The Combat — Ship Comparison page will help you pick an appropriate combat ship.

2. Fit the bounty-hunting kit

   A mix of thermal (a couple of pulse/burst lasers) and kinetic (multi-cannons), a Bi-Weave shield, two shield boosters, a chaff launcher, and a Kill Warrant Scanner. The KWS pays for itself in one session.

3. Go to a Low or Standard RES

   Drop into a ringed planet's RES; system security ships fight alongside you. Let them tank while you learn to land shots and flip pips.

4. Scan before you shoot

   Target a ship, scan it — only engage WANTED ships, or you'll earn a bounty on your own head. KWS-scan to stack the voucher value.

5. Practise pip discipline

   4 WEP on the attack, snap to 4 SYS when shields drop. Chaff when a gimballed NPC is tearing you up. Boost away to reset if you're losing.

6. Bank often

   Bounty vouchers are only paid when redeemed at a station (or any Interstellar Factors contact). Don't hoard a fortune in a ship that can be destroyed.

The mid-game is where combat stops being "can I win this fight" and becomes "how fast can I clear the site." Three things change: you engineer, you move to a medium hull, and you start stacking rewards.

Engineer the guns and the tank

Run the standard pattern: Felicity Farseer (FSD, done), then Tod McQuinn for G5 Overcharged multi-cannons, a G5 Overcharged power plant with Thermal Spread, Dirty Drives, and Heavy Duty boosters/HRPs. Engineer the module, not the ship — an engineered gun keeps its mods when you move it between hulls, so the spend is portable.

Graduate to a medium gun platform

Step up to a medium-pad flagship such as the Python Mk II, which carries roughly 84% of a Corvette's hardpoint tonnage but lands on a medium pad and rebuys for far less. This is the workhorse for High RES and medium-intensity CZs.

Start stacking rewards

• Massacre mission stacking — pull multiple kill missions targeting the same anarchy faction from a hub system, then farm the kills once. Every kill ticks several missions at once.
• Conflict zone bond farming — pick the winning side, focus high-value targets and specialists, and turn bonds in to the controlling faction for the influence bonus.
• Rank missions — combat reputation surfaces Federal/Imperial Navy missions; this is where the long Navy-rank grind toward the capstone ships actually happens (see How Combat Interacts With Other Systems).

End-game combat is about sustained throughput in the hardest venues and the prestige ladders.

• High-intensity Conflict Zones — the densest combat-bond farm in the game for a fully-engineered large hull. A geared ship clears bonds continuously; thin hulls get deleted.
• The capstone gunship — the Federal Corvette (Rear Admiral-gated, ~187M CR) or Imperial Cutter as the tanky alternative. The whole Federal thesis builds toward this.
• Combat Elite — grinding the combat rank to Elite (and Elite I–V beyond) is a long-tail prestige goal, achieved naturally through everything above.
• Top-tier Powerplay — high merit standing unlocks Power-specific modules (e.g. prismatic shields, Powerplay weapons) that feed straight back into your combat builds.
• PvP & Community Goal combat — the skill ceiling: FA-off, fixed-weapon convergence, min-maxed defensive fits.

Full head-to-head ratings, costs and per-class breakdowns live in the dedicated comparison dossier — this is just the shortlist by stage.

Combat is the most multi-currency role in the game — one kill can advance five different progress tracks at once.

Combat is not a silo — it's the hub the rest of the progression wheel turns on.

• Carry both damage types. The single most common "slow to kill" cause is an all-kinetic or all-thermal fit. Break shields with thermal, hull with kinetic.
• One Corrosive Shell, never two. The debuff doesn't stack usefully — one multi-cannon with Corrosive Shell boosts all your weapons against that target; everything else runs Auto Loader.
• Pip-flipping is free DPS and free tank. No module upgrade matches the value of disciplined 4-WEP / 4-SYS swapping.
• Let allies eat the shield phase. In Low/Std RES and CZs, let security or your faction's wing strip shields, then you cash the hull-phase kill. Throughput, not heroics.
• KWS pays the rent. A Kill Warrant Scanner stacks bounty value across jurisdictions — never bounty-hunt without one.
• Bank vouchers and bonds often. They're only worth anything redeemed; a rebuy wipes the unbanked ones.
• Sub-target to control the fight. FSD to stop a runner, Drives to pin, Power Plant to finish — high-alpha cannons and rails do this best.
• Engineer modules, not ships. Mods travel with the module across your hulls, so combat spend is portable — build for reuse.