What's the deal with patrol vessels having no identification associated with them? Is this a 1.5 bug, or was it always this way? I encountered my very first one today on the barren planet in the starter system; I've never seen one before so I have no idea if this is normal. It was in the Kriel territory but had no identifier and when I shot at it I received no loss of reputation to anyone.
I'm guessing it's a bug. But that's just a guess. I saw one on a planet a short warp jump away from the starting planet. I could see it clearly, but repeated radar pings showed nothing. I then flew up to it and circled around it about 100 meters out. After a few minutes of this, it suddenly showed up as Zirax (forgot the craft name), so I fled. Even stranger, it never fired at me even though I was well within its range and the Zirax are hostile to me. This is on 1.5 experimental.
Are you in SP or MP? This seems fairly common in MP even with BAs/POIs. I always attributed it to lag.
I don't know about the OP, but for me it was single player. I just attributed to a bug and forgot about it until I saw this post. That was the only time I've had that particular problem.
For me this was singleplayer. It was hovering very close to a Kriel area on a starter system barren planet. I have neutral relations with them so perhaps this is why it did not fire back, but I don't like that my ship began firing upon it immediately...very odd.
LOL that's literally the point, it was completely unidentified. There was no name, there was no acknowledgement when you blong the detector. It was there, it flew around, my turrets fired upon it, but it had NO LABEL of any kind, not even a ? or < >. Nothing whatsoever. And I received no reputation penalty for the shots upon it to any faction.
Finding the Planetary Patrol Vessel does not count towards identifying any faction. Not sure if intended.
Heh. So I flew up super close to it, turns out it was a Zirax Kuviera patrol vessel. But it wouldn't identify until I was within a couple hundred meters. After I downed it, it began exhibiting the strangest behavior. It ... sinks like a lawn dart, but it has a buoyant rear end. The ass end of the ship floats towards the sky but the nose pegs into the ground. Even weeble-wobbles around on the nose of the craft. It's mostly transparent, I clip through it. But sometimes it will catch collission and flip about like some kind of neurotic glitchy mess. Guess I won't be getting the cargo box loot. Shame.
This what I was talking about. Pretty much anything in MP can refuse to ping. It can be pretty infuriating actually.
I brought down a patrol ship as well that exhibited some odd behavior as well - parts of the ship were impossible to walk/fly through, as if there were some collision hull around it. Dismantling it with the multitool was a bit of a challenge as well, as that same invisible nothing would act as if the beam were hitting the block I was aiming at, but was not doing anything to the block. Some I had to hit at strange angles, others I had to walk right up against, and some I had to hit from greater range. Positive this is some manner of bug, but haven't seen another PV to shoot down for testing.
I believe that the ships without a tag actually belong to the warlord faction. You will not receive any rep loss or gain because they are supposed to be permanently hostile - there is no way to make the entire galaxy friendly with you anymore. If a ship has no tag then it will be hostile. @InDiGo That is an issue that occurs with ships that are still considered in motion. They added a new 'feature' a few updates ago where ships will spin or drift somewhat once they have been disabled. As long as they are in this state, there will be invisible barriers making moving through the ship nigh impossible and make dismantling it much harder. iirc, removing all the thrusters will halt the spin and then all the invisible barriers will vanish allowing both travel through the ship as well as salvaging it.
To identify an object, point your crosshairs directly at it. While in space you will need to be within the 3,000 meter render range, of course. On planets it seems to be 500 meters. Pinging your detector without looking at the object only works if it is sufficiently close to you.
In MP at least this does not always work because things won't even show up as a ? in my experience. They just suddenly pop in and then still refuse to identify whether you point your cross hairs at them or not. It's gotten me killed a couple of times. In my picture above I had already pointed my cross hairs at that Polaris vessel as I moved from the other side of the station towards it as an example. I actually experienced the same problem as OP with the Zirax Kuviera patrol vessel on Eleon's default MP server. My turrets wouldn't even attack it at 1st. After a Server restart it finally became targetable and I was able to identify and take it out. It really had me worried at first because it was following me around but it wasn't attacking and my turrets wouldn't attack it either.
