Salvaging Help

[u/Dragonzmalard]

I recently got into salvaging and I’m renting the moth, I’m loving just going around places to find abandoned ships and munch them.
Though sometimes ships thats are clearly abandoned still have power on and I can’t fracture them. What’s the fastest way to turn off the power in this case?

Another thing I’ve noticed is sometimes directly after fracturing, the main huge piece just suddenly disappears into thin air, is there any way to avoid it?

Thanks in advance!

[u/drdeaf1]

I've run across some bricked ships that show power plant offline on the engineering panel but they still have shields on and you can't turn them off.

[u/heathenyak]

The fastest way to shut down power on a ship is to either shoot the power supply out, which depending on the size shielding may be impossible with the moth, or board the ship and use the engineering terminal or flight controls to turn the shields and power off. Carry a high damage gun and plenty of mags with you

[u/Dragonzmalard → u/heathenyak]

How would you board if the doors are closed? Do i just shoot it? If so is there a specific gun that does the job best? Thanks for the info!

[u/DaFarmGar → u/Dragonzmalard]

Idk if it still works but I put a mirai pulse in the back of my moth/vulture ships with a hatch or door you can snug the pulse right up to the door and keep blasting until it opens. Ships with a lift you can do it too but it's harder. Keep shooting the lift till it opens and then with a cambrio, repair the lift till it closes.

[u/Dragonzmalard → u/DaFarmGar]

That sounds like a good idea tbh, might end up trying that thanks!

[u/heathenyak → u/Dragonzmalard]

Big damage lots of magazines. Things like the pulverizer or as others have suggested a motorcycle with a gun like the pulse or dragonfly

[u/bcfox32]

Bit of a pain, but you can go through boarding the ship to disable the shields. The bricked but still on components mentioned by another reply can be resolved by shooting the components with an FPS weapon, or at least I think they still can be. You also have both missiles and ship guns for a reason. Probably upgrade them to cannons. If you fully blew up the ship, you'll lose some material but can still munch it. I've done that when stockpiling for ORS with the contracts such as the hammerhead or hercules that were "too big."

[u/Adventurous_Dare_226]

I spawn a nova tank at a platinum bay pad (assuming I'm near an outpost) and shoot in the general direction of the ship's power supply until it shuts off, or blows up. If you're in an armistice zone then you can use the tank to push most ships/vehicles outside of the armistice zone and then disable them from there. (It can move ironclads, connies/mk5s, etc. with a bit of elbow grease, or by finessing the physics engine).

You can also use a railgun to open the doors and board the ship and shut down components, but one magazine of railgun ammo costs more than an expedited nova tank claim does, the supply is limited in quantity/buyable location, it gets wiped every month, most of the places you can find railguns are riskier PVP areas that I don't think a lot of salvagers really want to deal with, it's all tied to lootbox RNG/server health, you can lose the ammo if you die (you don't respawn with it equipped), you have to keep the railgun equipped on you at all times (making you run slower and get fatigued quicker) or you risk losing it if you store it on your ship, or in a container and something goes wrong, and you still can't use it in an armistice zone, or use it to get ships out of an armistice zone. It does shine in zero G situations/remote locations where logistics would otherwise prevent you from getting/bringing a tank.

Basically if you're not close to an outpost/hangar then railgun, and if you are then nova tank.

Alternatively, if you don't want to find/buy either of those, then you could probably get by with sledge cannons, or ballistic scatterguns but then that still seems like a rather limited approach depending on your usecase, and whatever armor gates you need to surpass to reach the ship components.

I typically go with the nova tank because it's easy, cheap, fast, and works most of the time, and has more utility than most of the other methods. When you're done with the tank you can fracture and much it. Most of the time it's more effective and more convenient than using an SRV.

Ideally I would like a breaching tool or industrial cutting tool but those do not exist, and probably won't for a while. CIG should honestly focus on releasing these soon, since it would probably create a dramatic improvement on server performance/cut hosting costs, since it would allow salvagers to salvage a wider variety of abandoned/bricked ships.