Heat Signature: Throw Yourself Into Space

[Wisp]

I flopped this into the random indie game thread but then realized I am going to play this and will want someplace to talk about it. Viola! This thread.

Suspicious Developments | Suspicious Developments | PC | 09/21/17 | $15

Heat Signature, by Suspicious Developments, headed by Tom Francis (Gunpoint and Morphblade), releases today (in an hour, in fact). Control procedurally generated characters in a procedurally generated galaxy as they infiltrate procedurally generated spaceships to complete procedurally generated objectives.

The entire game is played from a top-down perspective, and you can zoom in from your character all the way out to the entire galaxy. You steer an infiltration pod around the galaxy, dock with ships, and creep through them to accomplish objectives.

You can pause and slow time at will, the idea is to get into tricky situations but be able to get out of them with clever use of your items and the game's systems, and accomplish cool stuff by thinking through it, rather than relying on fast reaction times. There's a wide variety of guns, traps, teleporters, and other assorted sci-fi gadgets to help and/or harm you.

There is an overarching goal of "liberating the galaxy," but I'm not sure what that means. When you die or get captured, you simply begin playing as a new character in the same galaxy. Every character has a "life goal" mission, an especially hard task that can tie into other characters you've played. For example, in this video Tom gets a new character whose life goal is to rescue her daughter, who was the character Tom was playing before, whose career ended when she got captured:


If you fail to rescue one of your characters, they can show up in your Steam friend's games. You can also enshrine an item when you retire a character, and this can be seeded into your friend's games as well.

Tom Francis is a borderline obsessive chronicler of his thoughts and thinkings while creating, and you can review them on his youtube channel, if you like.

 

[indierthanthou]

Totally didn't realize this was being released today. Considering how much I liked Gunpoint, I will definitely be picking this up. My only worry is that it will start to get repetitive (as many procedurally generated games do).

 

[Wisp]

Totally didn't realize this was being released today. Considering how much I liked Gunpoint, I will definitely be picking this up. My only worry is that it will start to get repetitive (as many procedurally generated games do).

Yes, I have similar reservations (the game seems similar to Streets of Rogue, which, while cool, I very quickly grew tired of), but Gunpoint was fantastic, and Tom seems to have put a lot of thought into the systems, and how these kinds of games work (I included the video of him thinking through problems with variety in mission generation above), so I'm in for $15, no doubt.

Anyway, you can buy the game now, launch discount puts it at $13.49. Easy buy.

 

[Wisp]

Damn, creeping through a spaceship with a sword in one hand and a silenced pistol in the other feels pretty badass!

One note: it is very execution light - time always slows when you aim, there's a very generous auto aim, and melee weapons have lunge ranges measured in meters. Definitely no crazy top down shooter skills needed here.

That's balanced by permadeath. One hit, you die (usually).

There's a basic loot system where weapons and gadgets can gain modifiers, and unique items, which encourages you to always find more stuff.

You can speed time while flying by holding f! Essential info!

Only played through the tutorial and some easy missions, but it's very satisfying so far.

 

[Kildorn]

The skill tree is also pretty neat. Based on your galaxy, you accumulate some fake resource and liberate stations which basically turn into an unlock skill tree.

ESC menu will allow you to regen your map if you don't like it.

Overall this is crazy fun, worth noting that you're expected to retire characters often.

 

[Jab]

Spent the night streaming this. I like the variety of items, but I would like to see more options in terms of gameplay: More ship types, enemy variations and tactics that don't require items. Also flying the ship is a major pain that doesn't seem to get better.

 

[Jam]

I've always been on the fence about this. I listen to the Crate & Crowbar podcast that Tom is on, and I loved Gunpoint, but I loved Gunpoint as much for its writing as for its fairly simple mechanics. Tom has a habit of being incredibly anal about listing out mechanics and their interactions whenever he's talking about games and I did worry that Heat Signature might be a bit, uh, soulless.

 

[Wisp]

I did worry that Heat Signature might be a bit, uh, soulless.

It's not. Writing is definitely less a thing, but the name generator is rigged to create playful, absurd names, and items have goofy descriptions that are fun to read. The art is bright and colorful, and there are 4 different factions, each with their own look for their ship.

Here's my inventory screen showing the listing for a sword, for example:

I mean, it's definitely not a story game, but there is a lot of wit and character.

I would like to see more options in terms of gameplay: More ship types, enemy variations and tactics that don't require items. Also flying the ship is a major pain that doesn't seem to get better.

Flying the pod felt a lot better once I trusted the brake -- it controls speed relative to your target, so you don't have to worry about it zipping away when you slow down.

The game does get more varied as you go -- I just liberated my first station, which not only granted me a new item in shops, but also a new modifier for missions, bloodless, which means no killing. Since that's been my only strategy so far, that's an interesting wrinkle.

But I do agree, variety is a concern of mine, though I usually play procedural games for a relatively short amount of time, anyway, so I'm not expecting hundreds of hours or anything.

 

[roBurky]

Well this is actually awesome. I've played about two hours, and just got a character that was able to take on their personal mission.

My first character was Charity Caulder. She wanted to steal the Lemogne Object to pay off her girlfriend's debts. She never even found out where the Lemogne Object was - she got captured on her first attempt at a hard-rated mission.

Up steps her dad, Kells Caulder. He just wants to rescue his daughter. Charity started with a wrench and a hacking tool, and I played her avoiding killing or hurting too many people. Kells didn't have that option. His daughter was in trouble, and all he had to do something about it was a quick-fire gun and a grenade launcher. A lot of people died to that gun on those first few missions, but later things changed. He gained a new client who wanted no killing, the new equipment he was finding on the spaceships he infiltrated were things like rechargable teleporters, and he liberated a station that would sell him an unlimited quantity of remote keycard cloners. His strategy changed, out of necessity, and out of adapting to the tools he had available, to be more like his daughter's. But he kept that quick-fire gun to hand, and when things went bad, he'd still bloodily clear a room with it.

Until he finally got the cash together to pay for the intel on where Charity was being kept. A huge spaceship, full of guards, each one fully armored against every weapon he owned. With this intel, Kells tried to prepare for it. But no matter how many missions he took, or spaceships he raided, he could not find a single armor-piercing weapon in the galaxy. And each time he screwed something up and took a bullet, he got a little bit weaker the next time. He couldn't keep searching forever.

So he put his gun in his stash, bought a fresh 5-use keycard cloner, and embarked on his personal mission, knowing that once he was aboard he would have no way to use violence to get himself out if anything went wrong. It really felt like this was the conclusion of his personal journey, his final test being to give up his rage, and fully embrace his daughter's way of doing things to save her.

This was the equipment he took with him on the mission:


A wrench, useless against armored guards but he didn't think to leave it at home.
A 3-use sidewinder that can teleport him around corners to any location within range there is an unobstructed winding path to.
A 5-use slipstream that slows down time and speeds him up.
A 1-use glitch trap that can lay down a trap that teleports someone to another location. e.g. to space.
A 5-use visitor that can teleport him through walls to somewhere within range, then teleports him back again after 2 seconds.
a 3-use subverter for hacking things
a 5-use key cloner that can copy guards' keycards through walls.
a 5-use swapper that uses teleportation to swap locations with a guard.

The plan was:
Use the key cloner to make copies of the keys to move about the ship
Use the rest of the tools to somehow bypass rooms full of guards without detection.
Find Charity.
Get out.
Celebrate.

He didn't get through without being seen, but some quick uses of sidewinder meant he avoided letting anyone raise the alarm. But this meant once he reached the fifth layer of security, his sidewinder was out of charges. And then he discovered the thing that threw all the planning out the space window: this ship had a never-before-seen SIX levels of security door. His key cloner had run out of power getting him through the fifth.

All those thoughts about personal growth and final test turned out to be for nothing. Violence was going to be necessary. There was one guard with a key to the room Charity was being kept in, and Kells needed it.

The saviour would be the subverter, the kind of hacking tool that Charity used to use. There were automatic turrets on this ship. maybe they used armor-piercing bullets? New plan:
Hack a turret.
Get the guard with the key in front of the turret.
Loot the key.
Find Charity.
Get out.
Celebrate.

The area the key guard was wandering didn't have a turret. But if Kells got in range of them, maybe some combination of the swapper and visitor could move them far enough to get them to the turret? I got Kells closer, and started thinking about how this was going to work. I realised Kells was in the cockpit, next to the oblivious captain. Best take them out now, so he wouldn't have to worry about the ship escaping to a hostile station if the alarm got raised. A whack of the wrench, then back to plotting.


But the captain was armored too, of course. Kells really should have left that wrench at home. Maybe there was something to that idea of this being a personal growth story. Now there was a very surprised, but armed and armoured captain standing face to face with an intruder in the heart of the ship. While they raised their gun to fire, I paused.

And realised Kells never needed to use violence. The visitor teleporter could get through security doors, just only for two seconds. But he was in range of Charity herself now, the last security door was to the room she was being held in. Two seconds was all he needed.

He teleported into Charity's cell. He picked her up, and the two of them were pulled back to the cockpit by the visitor device, next to a doubly surprised captain. Kells triggered his slipstream, and ran. The alarm was raised, guards began jumping in front of him with their own personal teleporters. Kells just kept running. He was dodging bullets, running in circles, triggering more charges of the slipstream. The ship was huge. There were no windows. He had to make his way back through the entire ship, under fire, with his daughter over his shoulder.

Approaching the final section, the first set of guards he'd had to avoid were in his way, with no way around. He waited for the right moment, used the swapper on the guard at the back to switch places with them, then activated his slipstream and ran for it down the long corridor away from the rest.

Except, he didn't, because the slipstream was out of charges. He caught a bullet just a few rooms away from his pod, dropped his daughter, and fell. The guards dragged him to the airlock, and thew him out into space.

As he floated in the void, he called his pod to come rescue him. If he could just get back on board the ship, he could still get her back! But he was bleeding, and all the wounds he'd taken in the time he'd spent uselessly searching the galaxy for the right weapon finally caught up with him. Kells bled out before the pod could reach him.


Kells is dead, but Charity Caulder is still alive, in a space cell somewhere out there in the galaxy. I can't rescue her any more, but I'm told someone on my Steam friends list might be given the chance to.

 

[Kildorn]

Some of the modifiers are just obnoxious. Every goon has shields for example.

Overall this is great fun in small bursts because the systems interactions are wonderful.

 

[Riztro]

This is great fun, controls are tight enough that you don't have to be pausing all the time, but having the pause lets you plan out a path and then change that plan when things inevitably go wrong. It's also got a semi-hidden challenge mode where you get a mission every time you liberate a station and those seem preset, or at least they don't let you pick a loadout. The assassination mission where you start with two shields scares me a bit.

My first ship with the panic shields on everyone was one of the least graceful things I've been part of in gaming. The guards had a shield that popped when they saw me, and nonlethal weapons, I had to assassinate one of them and tehre were enough that they all hung out in groups of four. With my equipment all I could think to do was run en and get one of them, after which they all shielded up, stunned me and dragged me to the airlock but since I wasn't injured I could keep picking myself up with the pod over and over again, and since it was a rouge ship it didn't have a base to return to. Cue twenty minutes of me running at groups of guards, running away from shielded guards, getting thrown out the airlock, rinse repeat. It was great fun, and next time there were shields on a mission I brought tools to bypass or bring them down before I went.

 

[roBurky]

Does the game still have the namesake feature? 4 hours play, and I still haven't seen a ship that could detect my pod's heat signature.

 

[Qorgyle]

I've had 4 cracks at trying one of the Defector missions, each one ending in failure. But for whatever reason that just made me laugh hysterically (it's just so brutal (shotguns in this case) and fast and the slomo just makes it funnier as-in WHY DID I DO THAT) and start over. Really digging this, building up my arsenal up slowly and shuffling things around until I figure out how the various gadgets work.

Last mission I used the teleport trap to teleport all the guards into space ... and then I realized the one with the key went out too. CRAP. Ok I have the swapper still so let me swap real quick. I do that, the guard is puzzled but starts heading back and goes through the door, sees me, fires ... I panic and swap back with him so he ends up shooting himself (achievement unlocked!) and .... I'm stuck on the wrong side of the locked door in a dead end. No guard comes near enough to swap with, mission eventually times out (I just keep laughing) as the ship reaches the station.

Love the art and the writing too. "Kills people, usually forever."

 

[Qorgyle]

Does the game still have the namesake feature? 4 hours play, and I still haven't seen a ship that could detect my pod's heat signature.

That's a good question, I also noticed that the ships have tiny tiny detection cones now and evading/avoiding them is trivial. I am guessing he couldn't make that part be sufficiently fun and re-focused on the game inside of the ship. Considering how many gadgets your characters have vs ... nothing that you can enhance on the pod, I think that's a pretty good guess....

 

[Wisp]

I like the defector missions, and it makes me want a modifier on normal missions, something like -

ANTI-MATTER FILTER: can only enter ship with one item.

Slap that on a medium or hard mission and it jumps up a few notches.

I have a defector mission lined up where the guy starts with two longblades. Gonna dual-wield my way through this joint.

 

[RepoMan]

Polygon: 7.5.

In Heat Signature, a single wrong move can blow you out into the vacuum of space, while the right move makes you feel like a kung-fu genius.

It's a game with real confidence of design, where all the mechanics are meaningful and complementary to each other. It's also got a rather steep learning curve that, no matter how long you try to delay it, will eventually insist you not only learn every mechanic but master them...

I spent 10 hours just getting to the first stronghold and then failing repeatedly as all my characters died. I don't know how long it would take me to truly master the game, but it eventually demands nothing less. And I didn't want that. The momentum that comes with the fast pace of the gameplay in most missions is its greatest strength. I was continually seeing new things, trying new things, surprising myself with what's possible. Then I reached multiple points where I was spending a whole half hour on a single mission only to fail, losing hard-won inventory and character progress. I would come back to take a newly generated but equally difficult stab at the missions again in another hour or so with my next character. And likely fail again. Then come back in an hour. It ground the game’s pacing to a halt for me.

There are options to get out of failure-state scenarios. For example, when I got tossed out an airlock, I was able to summon my ship, pick myself up and loop right back around to the vessel for another try. Some items do a delayed teleport — even if a character is unconscious and in trouble it can zip them right back to a safe room. Up through the ”audacious” difficulty level, this is all helpful and keeps the pace up. But each time I was kicked into the vacuum of space, my character’s tolerance for floating adrift was lowered. Eventually my luck dried up. When I really needed these systems of forgiveness on “mistake” difficulty they weren’t as available.

Sounds like the sort of issue that only some players (like me!!!) would encounter, and that many in this thread might blow right through because awesome. Let us know how the endgame goes, everyone, and how grindy or otherwise it gets.

 

[Kildorn]

I had a mission where I docked to rescue a prisoner in a warzone mission.

Three seconds after I dock, missiles hit, killing the captive instantly.

While unfair as all hell, it was funny.

 

[Wisp]

The fact you can warp virtually infinite guns that aren't on cooldown into your hands is pretty OP, but hilarious.

The only way I got through a defector mission.

 

[Viz]

The game difficulty scaling is pretty uneven, though I'm actually not sure whether this is a plus or minus--certain mission traits, which can appear at difficulties as low as medium, are extremely difficult to manage--whereas if you get a lucky draw you can complete even Mistake-level missions with near naked kits.

I've succeeded at both personal missions I've done but it honestly involved a great deal of luck both times. The first time was a large ship full of shielded guards (this is one of the most obnoxious traits, and on a rescue mission I'm not so comfortable with the idea of trying to just stealth/TP past)--I brought two crashbeams and a subverter but this turned out to be a gross underestimate of what I actually needed to force my way through; if I hadn't lucked upon a self-recharging crashbeam in the ship itself I would most certainly have failed. The second one, I got blown out of the ship by one of those ejecting rooms, re-docked with around 30 seconds left on the time limit and managed to teleport my way to the target with about 12 seconds left. Then I shot him and he exploded (oops, forgot about that) and knocked me out. I woke up with 5 seconds remaining and blasted my way out the window. That guy retired as soon as he got back to base.

 

[ehm ecks]

This game is really good. I sort of see the Polygon guy's complaint; yes, if I were actually motivated to beat the game it would be a slog. I'm not, so it isn't. I'm quite certain I'll stop playing long before the end, but so what? I'll have tons of fun running around murderating people in the meantime.

The game does seem pretty aggressive about encouraging you to retire, too; after three or four liberations a character was generated 30% liberation progress because they were too famous. So I tried their personal mission, failed, and with an emergency resuscitation timer that was reduced to 0 I figured it was a good time to retire that individual.

And yeah, I'm bad. There's so much you can do but mostly I panic and just stab or shoot everything I see. I'd love to effectively employ the breaching pod, but...yeah, nope.

 

[Alan Au]

I'm really loving the Defector missions because they encourage me to try different tactics with equipment I wouldn't normally think to bring (or be able to afford), and all with the comforting safety net of knowing I can just restart them if I botch things beyond the point of recovery.

 

[roBurky]

My first character was Charity Caulder. She wanted to steal the Lemogne Object to pay off her girlfriend's debts. She never even found out where the Lemogne Object was - she got captured on her first attempt at a hard-rated mission.

Kells is dead, but Charity Caulder is still alive, in a space cell somewhere out there in the galaxy. I can't rescue her any more, but I'm told someone on my Steam friends list might be given the chance to.

An update to this: Charity has been rescued. By the girlfriend she was trying to pay the debts of, played by Alan Hazelden. They've now paid off those debts and retired together.

 

[Viz]

Hot tip: nothing works when carrying a body. Stealth shields turn off, and teleporting causes you to drop the guy. This can make capture and rescue missions very inconvenient. But things that teleport other people still work fine. You can teleport a body with a swapper, though it may mean finding a safe place to stash the body and evading the same patrols several times, and I assume glitch traps work as well (though I haven't had the opportunity to test them).

 

[Mutzli]

Hot tip: nothing works when carrying a body. Stealth shields turn off, and teleporting causes you to drop the guy. This can make capture and rescue missions very inconvenient. But things that teleport other people still work fine. You can teleport a body with a swapper, though it may mean finding a safe place to stash the body and evading the same patrols several times, and I assume glitch traps work as well (though I haven't had the opportunity to test them).

Glitch traps work, (un)fortunately. I was carrying my rescuee back to the pod, when I walked over a previously placed glitch trap, which promptly teleported him out to space... Where I only narrowly managed to snatch him back up, in my first ever use of the remote control pod.

 

[Alan Au]

Kells is dead, but Charity Caulder is still alive, in a space cell somewhere out there in the galaxy. I can't rescue her any more, but I'm told someone on my Steam friends list might be given the chance to.

The legend of Kells Caulder lives on, via the brilliance of the shared friends-list item inheritance. Kells Caulder's Last Dance, an exceptional self-charging Slipstream, briefly found its way into the hands of Magic Janevski during a consolation pre-retirement thievery excursion deep into Glitcher territory. How it got there, nobody knows, except for the handful of dead Glitchers unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with my absurdly well-armed thief. Alas, his ultimate prize lay just out of reach beyond a cohort of armored and heat-sensored guards on a ship 3-minutes from docking in enemy territory.

 

[roBurky]

Oh man. Gemini Easterling just did a stronghold liberation mission, where you have to hijack a ship to crash into an enemy station. They got to the cockpit, set the course, and discovered they had ONE SECOND to get out of the ship.

But it was fine. Easterling was a professional. They sidewinded to a window at the front of the ship and shot it out, venting themselves into space. They started to remote control their offworld angel pod over to rescue themselves, but then there was a gunshot, and control was dragged back to an unconscious Easterling. The ship was accelerating towards the stronghold so fast, it had caught up with Easterling and collected them back in through the open window. They got thrown back out the window, they fell back in, they got shot, they got thrown out. Repeat.

On like the third throw out, Gemini finally went spinning off into space, but so fast that the pod could barely catch up. And then it overshot when I trusted a little too much in the angel scoop. And they bled out before it could brake.

But not before they received the news that the stronghold was liberated.

 

[dermot]

Oh man. Gemini Easterling just did a stronghold liberation mission, where you have to hijack a ship to crash into an enemy station. They got to the cockpit, set the course, and discovered they had ONE SECOND to get out of the ship.

But it was fine. Easterling was a professional. They sidewinded to a window and shot it out, venting themselves into space. They started to remote control their offworld angel pod over to rescue themselves, but then there was a gunshot, and control was dragged back to an unconscious Easterling. The ship was accelerating towards the stronghold so fast, it had caught up with them and caught them through the open window. They got thrown back out the window, they fell back in, they got shot, they got thrown out. Repeat.

On like the third throw out, Gemini finally went spinning off into space, but so fast that the pod could barely catch up. And then it overshot when I trusted a little too much in the angel scoop. And they bled out before it could brake.

But not before they received the news that the stronghold was liberated.

Wait, when Easterling first got vented out, it was into the path of the path of the ship that they had hijacked? And they got scooped back in through the same window?

 

[roBurky]

Wait, when Easterling first got vented out, it was into the path of the path of the ship that they had hijacked? And they got scooped back in through the same window?

The window was on the front, so they got vented out directly ahead of the accelerating hijacked ship. So yeah, they fell right back in through the same window.

 

[roBurky]

Some basic interactions I did not discover until way too late in the game:

Spoiler

• You can pickpocket keys from guards with the 'e' key.
• You can turn off turrets by pausing next to them and selecting the option on the side of the screen.
• The red barrel-looking things in rooms are the engines. Shoot them with a lethal weapon to make them explode and destroy the room a few seconds later.
• You can fly ships manually and shoot their weapons when you are in the pilot seat.
• Apparently subverters work on security doors? I haven't tried this yet.
• You can eject from your pod with the throw key.
• You can throw things. I knew this, but kept forgetting about it.
• When you lay a glitch trap, you are laying the actual device. Each person glitched uses up a charge. If you leave the ship with the glitch trap still deployed and active, it doesn't get ported to your stash.

Some advanced clever stuff I was still discovering with delight after 20 hours:

Spoiler

• Destroying all the engines is an alternative to taking out the pilot for stopping the ship from escaping.
  
• Glitch traps work on dead/unconscious people. Including rescue targets.
• Swappers also work on dead/unconscious people.
• When you have a slipstream active, you can go fast enough to run through windows.
• You don't need to harm a pilot to stop them piloting. Swapping with them works. As does hitting them even if they're armoured.
• You don't need an anti-shield device to capture a target with a shield. Vent them into space and scoop them up.

 

[Damien Neil]

The Steam trading cards for this game are all going to be based on player-submitted stories. From Tom Francis's blog:
http://www.pentadact.com/2017-09-27-heat-signatures-launch-and-first-player-legend/#more-8925

Ferris ‘Swapshot’ Harris


As a ship’s security guard, especially as an armoured elite, you have to be ready for anything. This one saw Ferris Harris coming. He saw an Offworld Angel coming at his ship’s broken window full burn, and even though he knew it couldn’t dock, he was ready for whatever other nonsense they were about to try.

At the moment of impact, Harris hit eject. He threw himself from his pod, through the pressure-retention field, and skidded to a halt directly in front of the guard. The guard didn’t flinch. He fired. And Harris swapped with him.

The guard was not ready for this. He suddenly found himself staring at the blue glow of the forcefield Harris just came through. He couldn’t process the situation fast enough to realise what would happen next: his own bullet hit him in the back of the head. His heavy armour saved him from the lethal impact, but the force was just enough to nudge him one step forwards – into the pressure field.

What we don’t know is if, in the 15 seconds between being flung into the icy void and asphyxiating, he had time to figure out what the hell just happened.

 

[ehm ecks]

The Steam trading cards for this game are all going to be based on player-submitted stories. From Tom Francis's blog:
http://www.pentadact.com/2017-09-27-heat-signatures-launch-and-first-player-legend/#more-8925

This one by my friend roBurky is a favourite

Talk about burying the lede.

Actually, going back to the example cited: watching the brief clip of dude swapping the guard in front of the window, the guard leaves a bloodstain. I...am not certain his armor did in fact save him from his own bullet.

And if it's true that armored guards (sometimes?) have armor-piercing ammo, well. That is interesting news.

 

[Damien Neil]

New character, grab some easy mission to get started, get to the ship...oh. This is a bloodless mission, and I'm carrying nothing but a longblade.

And this is how I learned that you can pickpocket keys. Ghost Thief: Achievement unlocked.

Later on, I successfully complete a mission by shooting out a window after the alarm time has hit zero, being blown out into space about a tenth of a second before the ship docked and I would have been captured. Feeling Like an Rock Star: Achievement unlocked.

 

[Damien Neil]

This game is so much fun.

Last night, I was playing while completely exhausted. Every mission went to the strains of Yakety Sax. Board ship, adopt posture of extreme stealth. Sneak through room to clone a key, three guards see me, I run for it, six more guards join the chase, I sprint through a room with bullets hitting the wall behind me, there's something like 12 guards trailing behind as I round a turn and charge three more, trigger a shield and just bull through them without stopping, eventually grab the objective and leap out the window.

Guards left on the ship all look at each other, say, "What the HELL was that?"

 

[roBurky]

Some more Heat Sig moments:


I got around to unlocking foundry tech last, so I was trying to focus on using their stuff once I got it. I board a ship and fire a concussive grenade at the first group of guards I see. The officer is shielded, so survives, and the ship is laid out such that every other guard on the ship, about twenty of them, heard this and comes running.
I wait around the corner until they all arrive, then fire a breach grenade at the lot of them. Shields say they reflect all damage, but nothing protects you from the portion of the ship you're standing in being obliterated.
There's now a hole in the middle of the ship, and no path around it. So I go back to my pod.

And then teleport into the home-made docking port inside the ship using the glitcher's tick.


Later, I start a rescue mission. As I undock, the target ship flies right past my station. As I begin to thrust towards it, the station starts firing at it, knocking pieces of it off. My rescue target gets vented out into space, flying past my pod, still alive and ready to be scooped. I'd barely moved since undocking.

 

[ehm ecks]

I fucking hate armored guards, and finding AP guns and swords is apparently Not Easy, given that I've seen exactly two AP blades and they were both overpriced mystery shop objects. But, fuck it, I have a restockable grenade launcher and this mission with armored guards doesn't have a time limit let's see what happens. And, uh. I guess the guards were widely separated, because I needed to nuke three packs on the way to the rescuee, and nobody outside the room reacted to the grenade detonations, so.

But. There was one last armored guard between me and the captive. I shot his entourage and ran away, and as he charged around the corner I sidewindered past him. So he blundered on going "?" while I picked up the captive. Oh. The guard's in my only exfil route. Well, that's fine I'll just use the swap--oh. Right. I can't carry the captive when I swap. I don't really have a great plan, or any plan, but the guard is looking away from me (and at the door I must pass through) so I shoot him and duck back around the corner. And...he continues to be baffled. "?" "?" "?"

And then he walks to the corner of his room and stares at the wall "?". Not having a better idea, I pick up the captive and just run by him, hugging the opposite wall. He doesn't notice. I bumble into one or two more guards, but they're not armored and a silenced pistols solves them permanently.

Audacious mission: down.

 

[Damien Neil]

Is there any way to enter a ship through an unbroken window? I've ejected and flown in through a broken one, but my attempts at either shooting out a window from the outside or ejecting into it with enough speed to break through have all failed.

 

[roBurky]

Is there any way to enter a ship through an unbroken window? I've ejected and flown in through a broken one, but my attempts at either shooting out a window from the outside or ejecting into it with enough speed to break through have all failed.

I don't know. I guess it would make sense if there isn't? Protecting from things coming from outside is probably what they'd be designed for.

 

[ehm ecks]

Is there any way to enter a ship through an unbroken window? I've ejected and flown in through a broken one, but my attempts at either shooting out a window from the outside or ejecting into it with enough speed to break through have all failed.

Well, if you run a breacher pod into the room you'll sort of be entering through that window. Sort of.

 

[Therlun]

My current personal mission has me capturing someone, yet all the guards and all the bosses (including my capture target) have permanent shields. Is the only way to do this to completely stealth the mission and then push my target out into space somehow?

 

[Viz]

My current personal mission has me capturing someone, yet all the guards and all the bosses (including my capture target) have permanent shields. Is the only way to do this to completely stealth the mission and then push my target out into space somehow?

You need a crashbeam. They shouldn't be too rare. Don't use a subverter unless the guards are equipped with non-lethal weapons, or you're confident that you can nail him before he attacks. If there are a lot of guards, brute forcing your way through will be difficult; if you can stealth it, do so. As mentioned above, a glitch trap may be very useful in getting your guy back to the pod or to a window. Also, it could be worse; they could have armor.

For the pushing people into space thing, I'm not totally sure that knocking a guy into space will disable him--teleporting people into the void with glitch traps doesn't seem to, and you yourself can fire weapons in space. But I haven't tried actually launching an active person into space by, say, blowing out the window.

Well, if you run a breacher pod into the room you'll sort of be entering through that window. Sort of.

Isn't the breacher pod the default one? I thought the Foundry Brick was the one where you could make your own entrance. I only passed by a window once in the default pod and that resulted in getting the shit shot out of me (though I somehow survived, it kind of ruined the mission).