Railjack Tutorial?

[Xalaron]

So I just did the quest to acquire my railjack. Theres no info about controls given, how to operate the ship, nothing... I couldn't even figure out how to start railjack missions. Theres a quest available now called Call of the Tempestarii or some such. I started it but cannot beat the first mission. I get to a part with around 15 fighter enemies and they just shred my railjack to pieces. I can't figure out how to repair the ship or restore its HP, no idea how to tell why my guns can't shoot sometimes like they are out of ammo. I know nothing because nothing has been explained.

Every single guide I found on youtube is not in any way helpful, covering things about railjacks intrinsics and ship parts etc that I have no access to yet. Please someone help me get through this dumb content island somehow so I can never touch it again.

[FubarOne]

I'm wondering how you managed to get your ship shredded by an overwhelming number of fighters when all you should have had available were the basic missions on Earth Proxima, but ok I'll bite.

You pilot the ship by entering the controls at the front. This gives you access to the front guns. The guns on your railjack don't have ammo, they are all battery powered but overheat, hence why you might have thought they stopped working. The gauge at the bottom left shows the heat they accumulate. When it's full they stop firing and you have to wait until it completely empties before you can fire again. If you don't fully overheat then the gauge will go down and you can fire again before it fully empties.

You'll be alone on the ship if you're in solo mode before you get Command intrinsics, which you should be able to get after, oh maybe 1 mission. 1 Intrinsic, which you should easily get after one mission will let you get Rank 1 Command, which will let you hire a crew member. Go to Ticker in Fortuna and hire one, it doesn't really matter what they're like when you're starting out, but if you have high standing with their syndicate you'll get a discount.

At the dry dock console for your railjack set that crew member to be an Engineer. Engineers will defend against boarding parties if there is nothing to fix, and will even revive other crew members who are downed (which can be a downside sometimes, but still good to have). Engineers also will fix your ship and it doesn't cost resources for them to do so. It will only consume resources to fix stuff if you or another player fix stuff, so leave ship maintenance to your engineer.

Do some more missions, get some more intrinsics, rank up Command to get a second crew member. You can then either make them a second engineer to help out the first one defending and repairing, or set them as a gunner. Gunners are crazy aimbots that will wipe out most fighters even with fairly basic weaponry, but you do NOT get intrinsics for their kills.

Keep doing missions and you'll notice things go a lot more smoothly with crew members as they stay on task and don't run around doing whatever or nothing at all like some players. You can also give your crew members your weapons which they will use and even benefit from the mods on them, while not actually preventing you from using the same weapons, so put the most powerful guns you have in their hands.

Your first goals should be Tactical to 5, Engineering to 4, and Command to 5. All the other intrinsics can wait till after you get those since Tactical 4 lets you warp back to your railjack by selecting your Omni Tool in your gear wheel and 5 lets you summon your Necramech in railjack missions, Engineering 4 lets you craft artillery charges at the forges in the back of the ship during a mission, and Command 1, 3, and 5 are the ones that let you hire your first, second, and third crew members.

Learn to use your artillery to destroy crewships so you don't have to board them. You can exit the railjack into your archwing and fly up to the crewships, or you can enter the slingshot on the top floor of the ship in the back to launch yourself at the crew ships if you have Gunnery 3, or you can just hop down into the artillery at the back of the bridge, charge up your shot, and nuke the crew ship. A full health crew ship can be one shot by the artillery if you shoot the side engines that are in an active state. If the side engines are damaged then you don't get the damage bonus, but might still destroy it. Higher level missions have crew ships with external shielding which can prevent artillery strikes, but they have 3 nodes that you can destroy with your railjack guns to drop the shields. Corpus crewships have a node on top, one in the middle of the back, and one underneath. Grineer crew ships have 2 nodes on top and 1 underneath.

Some notes on weapon choice; Photor is good as a main gun if you have a gunner since it has punch through and can destroy the mobile shields that some corpus crewships and one of their fighters have. You can destroy the shields by hitting the deployer thing in the middle of the shield for the crewship, and also destroy the fighter through the shield, though the damage isn't spectacular, but if you have a gunner with pretty much any weapon it'll mop up everything else.

Ordnance (main gun alt fire) has limited ammo and is not typically that useful for taking down fighters since the fire rates are typically slow and a lot of them are projectile based so hitting fast targets sucks. But ordnance is good for hitting static targets like security nodes or gun emplacements on corpus fleet ships.

A lot of the ability mods are kinda meh, but Seeker Volley is the be all end all of abilities for your Railjack. If you have it equipped then your 3rd ability becomes a volley of around 20 missiles that absolutely ruin enemy fighters. There are some limitations around using railjack abilities, like the energy cost to use them increasing on use, then decreasing back to normal over time. You can sidestep these limitations in a couple ways. One is to just hop out of the controls and put down an energy pad, or set down your zenurik energy bubble. Another is to use Hildryn, who will increase the amount of shields the abilities use (instead of energy since she doesn't have any), but since shields recharge naturally, unlike energy, then you can use seeker volley more often without having to hop out of the controls. Another way is to use Lavos, who also doesn't have energy, but instead will put the ability on cooldown, after which you can use it again.

A note on using crew as pilots; they suck. Don't have a crew member set up to be a pilot at the start of the mission since leaving the controls to hop into artillery or craft ammo will have them jump into the console and ruin your shot on that crewship, or leave you who knows where since their flight is really erratic. If you want to have a pilot, like when you're in a grineer asteroid and want someone to shoot the exposed radiators outside, you can hit L to bring up your railjack tactical menu to change the role of one of your crew to pilot until the end of the mission.

But why do all this? Why go through everything to do all this when it just seems to be doing railjack to make doing railjack stuff easier?

Because it's not just railjack that all this affects.

You might look at all these intrinsics and wonder why would you care if it makes your Archwing faster or do more damage, or that it gives bonuses to your Necramech. Well those bonuses also apply to your Archwing and Necramech outside of railjack missions. And the bonuses can be pretty nice.

Also railjack is a good source of credits and endo since you can dissolve the plethora of mods and extra weapons you get since you'll likely only care about a couple of them and only need 1 copy of each.

Plus having a built up railjack and being able to tear through the first part of the mission when you're grinding yet more corrupted holokeys for your tenet melee and/or ferrox can actually be pretty fun.