I want a ship that’s harder to hit as I’m trying to get away. The starter ship has an okay back profile, but there’s not enough inventory.
Some shuttles inevitably spawn as tubes, and some have the inventory I need, but as soon as they turn just a little bit they’re pretty open. Sometimes I get hit by the AIs warning shot. They’re also not generally that fast.
What I really need is a balance between inventory and getting hit less.
Beef up your shields and invest in a phase beam. The beam fills up your ships shields and can come in handy when you are trying to escape. Or you can say fuck it and take them out with your new defense.
You know the old saying:
“The best defense is a fully SX-class upgraded Infra-knife in adjacent supercharger slots”.
You can expand the storage though. You just need the money
Or if you prefer you can use the ship customizer to find a part or class you like, and then use “that other website” to search for it by parts. (An example would be “Fighter dorsal r2d2”) and then use the Teleporter code to get to that system.
You know you can upgrade inventory space and class? Do missions that reward inventory upgrades and farm nanites to pay for class upgrades. You can make the starter ship S Class and max the inventory. If that’s too slow for you, find someone to dupe inventory upgrade modules for you.
You could look for exotics. They have those spherical cockpits and some of them are just like small darts. They are a pretty good allrounder but also quite expensive. Maybe they don’t have that much inventory but if you have the money for the ship you probably can get those extension modules to upgrade it.
If you start working towards it, I believe a Living Ship can be obtained in a week at the fastest. They’re not great for S-rank ships, but they do have massive inventories and are very cheap to run. Meanwhile, if you save up, grab the first Exotic you like, since they’re essentially the baseline “high average” you measure every other ship against. Interceptors can be acquired for “free” by locating one and doing a short fetch quest.
Also, once you’re deep into the game and can afford to class-up a ship, finding any C-class ship and upclassing it makes it the best ship, so hang on to anything you like the look of. Credits also become trivial once you can make agricultural operations and break open depots, which opens up the process of buying and scrapping Vy’keen fighters for nanites and inventory expansions.
Mechanical spoilers for ideas on saving up for your first Exotic:
spoiler
There’s a few money makers you have access to early. Salvaging crashed Haulers in 3* economy Gek systems is extremely fast and will get you an Exotic in no time, but salvaging ships anywhere will work well. Raiding Supply Depots and crafting the loot up into higher-value trade goods is a moderate all-rounder farm. Setting up an agricultural project in a base is also good, either use it to support crafting or just grow cash crops directly. Finally if you want to venture into civilisation space, there are player farms around; ones specialising in illegal goods are a decent way of getting initial funds.