Kill the sentinel mothership's weapon turrets and then what?

[dashiichi]

So I was bored after destroying a resource depot for the daily Quicksilver bot quest and decided to dance with some sentinel ships. Headed into space and worked my way up the alert levels. The ships really aren't any worse than some of the 3-star bounty missions other than not getting a shield boost when flying through the debris field. Fun times!

Anyway, get to level 5 and the mothership spawns. A little hectic but still fun. Wipe out the sentinel squadron and the weapon turrets on the mothership and then ... And then ... Nothing.

The alert level stayed at 5 stars and I'm flying around the mothership that has its alarm sounding but is otherwise not reacting. Shoot at this, shoot at that, no reaction.

So, is that it? Not even a nice explosion? Kind of a letdown.

[japp_02]

The mothership is invincible and has ever been since. Last time I tried extensively to wipe it was in Pathfinder, no success but you get plenty of materials IIRC. The difference now in Visions is that combat has quite the same difficulty but evading high level alert has become much more challenging. I feel that the pirate / sentinel ships will adapt to my strenght over the game when changing systems, they are consistently stronger, when I have decent ship upgrades for combat I can see that pirate groups perform much better against me, higher fire rate, faster re-attack patterns etc. , maybe it's random but that's what I can see.
Without maximum combat upgrades I don't feel it makes much sense acting against the mothership, also because of the constant high number of sentinels that spawn from it :)

It's too bad that dedicated freighter attack missions are rare and also broken at this point, here instead of pirates, only sentinel ships - and also the mothership should be involved but it is not.

[dashiichi]

Thanks! Yeah, I usually skedaddle after just a couple of rounds with the sentinel ships but this time I made sure that I had both a hard save and auto-save and decided just to go for it.

Other than keeping the shields recharged, it wasn't too bad; rather fun, actually. I do seem to recall that back in the day sentinel ships would keep spawning forever but it didn't happen on this round. Maybe HG is having mercy on us. (Nah)

I kept hoping that I could find the thermal exhaust port. Finally gave up and went to my freighter to store away the explosive drones and that was that. Anticlimactic ending.

[korfan]

I suspected there would be a mother ship but I haven't seen one yet.

Dumb question that I'll probably experiment with to find the answer, can you land on it? Wouldn't that be cool, you shoot out the turrets, then land, and fight your way to the command room?

[dashiichi]

It spawns with the level 5 wave. But, sadly, no hanger doors. There were some structures on the aft deck where freighter hanger doors would be but these were much smaller and had no openings.

[mock]

To be honest they need to be boardable. What’s the point of them sitting there like a lump after destroying their weapons.

[MechWarden]

Last time I fought one of those, the fighter waves kept coming ad nauseum. This was sometime after Next update but before the following updates.

It was neat and if you aren't careful you could get shot down by a beam cannon, but staying just out of range and shooting with some weapon types tend to take out turrets with boring ease.

But yeah, after that, there is nothing else as far as I know. No retreat, no backup, no victory; just a short feeling of accomplishment, followed by a sense of awkward incompleteness.

If the turrets repaired, which is what I would have expected, that'd be one thing. If another ship showed up, even just combat frigates, that'd add to the effect as well. But otherwise it just an unfinished event that breaks lore and immersion once you 'beat' it.

When push comes to shove, the Sentinels in the game don't live up to what is seen in recorded lore. Hirk probably would probably barely recognize them if he was somehow alive in the game now.