What ship types do you use and why?

[Mortus Eclipse]

I am just wondering what types of ships people are using and why they use them. Do you use certain ships for particular tasks, is rule of cool king, or do you just use the best ship you have till you find better?

[knighttemplar1960]

I like my haulers for most stuff and an explorer if I'm going long distances. Plus the occasional cool exotic.

[sturmrufer]

I always go for Exotic ships. They provide the best overall stats and even beats the new solarships. You can check the stats at the NMS wiki for all shiptypes. They did a real good job on that and my decision to go for an exotic was basicly depending on the information from the wiki.

[AmberAnvil]

I use a Living Ship for almost everything, an Explorer for distance. That's all.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

I seem to end up the Golden Vector often as not, but on my main save I use a little red Exotic for the most part. At some point, I realized I am happiest with one ship. I will collect some other but no real excitement for doing that anymore.

If one shows up I like I will grab it but been a long time since I camped out hoping for a good find.

[tkwoods]

I have one save with an S fighter, no other reason but it's the first one I've gotten and upgraded. So I hang with it. Another save I have an S Solar ship again just because it's nice and I like the looks.

[Comradovich]

I feel like I answer this question at least once a week, and I'm too lazy to retype my answer:

Originally posted by Comradovich:

Right right, your ships have several features: Class, Tier, and Type.
These three things define your ship. Only Type really matters in the long run, and then not super much in a mature save.
Class - C, B, A, S. These set the bonus ranges of your ship. It also sets and upper limit on the amount of slots you can unlock until you upgrade it. It does not always matter on how many of those slots start unlocked.
Tier - 1, 2, or 3. This is best explained as "size". 1 is a small, 2 is a medium, 3 is a large. This majorly governs how many slots the ship starts with unlocked. More than class. You can find a Tier 3 fighter in C class with more slots unlocked than an S class exotic. Be advised that some ship types only come in certain Tiers. You have to buy a lot more slots for these. This stat is hidden, you just have to recognize what the Tier features are. For instance, a T3 fighter has two cargo pods on either side of the nose. Those pods block the halo tail, meaning a halo fighter will never come in Tier 3.
Type - That's what we're on now.

Start with the bog standard and work our way up:

Shuttle - average stats across the board, it doesn't suck in any one area... which unfortunately means that it doesn't specialize in anything either. Comes only in Tier 1 or 2 as well. You'll never find a large shuttle. Doesn't exist. People hate shuttles because for almost every use, there's a better option out there. What the shuttle does have is the 2nd cheapest possible launch cost. This was big back in the day, but now... yeah, launch fuel is dirt cheap to make and the materials are at almost every landing site. You would use a shuttle if you're doing something that requires you to take off and land on the same planet multiple times. It'll save you from having to craft fuel as often. But since the bonus on every stat is so lackluster... why bother? The other fun thing about shuttles is their center of mass for the procedurally generated parts is off center. If you look at one close, it will always be just slightly off with equipment protruding from other things.

Explorer - highest hyperdrive starting bonus range. The worst possible explorer bonus still blows everything but the best possible exotic or living ship hyperdrive out of the water. You use this ship if you want to explore the galaxy in as few hops as possible. A T3 explorer will have two massive engines on either wing. That's how you recognize it. It has no bonus damage, and the shield bonus is better than only shuttles and most fighters. This has the cheapest launch cost. Unlike the shuttle it doesn't turn very fast, though. You're unlikely to use it to make multiple hops across the same planet because it turns like bus. I run into a ton of trees whenever I use this in atmosphere.

Fighter - highest damage bonus range. The worst fighter... still out damages every other ship type. I already told you what the T3 features were above. Shields are between shuttle and explorer ranges. No hyperdrive bonuses. Prior to Outlaws, if you wanted to hunt NPCs or freighters, this was your goto ship. There's now a better option, but it's still a contender. Issue is that with those shields you can dish out a lot of damage, but you have difficulty taking much damage yourself. If your wingmen aren't distracting enemies, you're losing shields pretty fast.

Hauler - highest unlocked starting cargo, highest starting shield bonuses. The bottom T1 cargo range is still better than most other ship's mid-range. You have to pay the least to upgrade a T3 hauler. Damage wise, C class has no bonus, and at S class you could be anywhere from slightly worse to about even with an S class shuttle. In terms of shields, the hauler is a BEAST. Outclasses everything. The problem is that at T3, it has to be, because it is also BEAST sized. Ain't nobody who can miss a T3 hauler shooting manually. You'll probably want this as your early game ship type. It'll hold all your stuff, cost you very little in terms of upgrades, and the shields forgive a lot of your combat mistakes. T3 features are varied, but include fans on the wings, ball cargo pods (both shielded and not), and refrigerator pods on the wings. Any of those three features are a T3. T3 haulers start massive. Hauler's upgraded CARGO is twice what every other ship type is.

Solar - They only come T1, but they're also the only ship type with those Vesper Sails. The sails drastically cut down on your pulse engine fuel usage. They also have only slightly worse damage bonuses than fighters. They start with shield bonuses in the fighter range, but end up exceeding it on the top end. Their hyperdrive bonuses compare favorably to haulers. If you're a pirate, this is probably your ship. I call it the "Smash and Grab Special". What it excels at is getting into a mass of ships, picking off the one ship or a few cargo pods, then getting out of there. The shields will keep you alive long enough to outrun sentinels or NPC pilots until you can engage the pulse engine. It will then sip your pulse fuel while you find new targets to brutalize. This is the best ship for raiding, it is also good if you have to visit multiple planets in the same system. You'll have to pull over and blast asteroids a lot less with one of these.

Exotic - This also comes in T1 only, but it's always an S class. It has the highest balanced stats. You have worse damage than a fighter, you have worse hyperdrive range than an explorer, and you have worse shields than a hauler. Thing is, you only miss these marks by a little. You're often in the same range as the worst S-class of each type. This is really the ship you get when you've "arrived" in NMS. You're going to spend a lot of materials and money upgrading it, but it'll be worth the investment. It'll perform well at nearly everything.

Living - Imagine a T2 S-class Exotic, but with only fighter range shields. When you get an upgrade for this ship in C class, you evolve it up into S class by spending nanites once it's installed. So, you almost never need more than 3 upgrades of any type, unless you're also maxing that type in your general inventory with another 3. This is a mature save ship, as discussed above. It's often a player's "other" ship. By this, I mean that it uses different materials than most other ships, so you'd use this to farm fuel or materials to use in the other ship. Like it uses silver for pulse engines instead of tritium. Thus, I'd blast asteroids in this for awhile and every scrap of tritium I got would go to the main ship instead. You find upgrades in the wild by pulsing around, or they get dropped off by frigates in missions. The storage space upgrades are unfortunately rare right now. Hopefully this gets fixed in a patch. You have to be very specialized when you go hunting for a specific living ship, because it's more complicated than the usual process. The flip side of this is that if you go through all the motions and it spawns at the spawn-point, it's always S-class. Your starting tech inventory is also huge compared to the others.

Hope that helps.

Some of that's off topic or more than you need, but hopefully it helps. Search is your friend.

[bobhome2]

I play on survival mode, so fuel can get annoying at times. So I usually have an explorer for that. For combat purposes, I have a fighter and an exotic. And I have a hauler I just grabbed up for the fun of it. All S-class, since I've been playing for a while.

[Mitrovarr]

I usually go for a class S fighter first. Large class S fighters aren't that expensive, and the game likes to throw a lot of random combat at you that is less tedious with a damage bonus. A really big fighter is a decent all arounder.

After that, an explorer is good for jumping. Although, in the late game, there's a lot of incentive to jump in your freighter. It takes a long time to get there first, though.

Haulers have a ton of slots and are good all around, but big high rank haulers are really expensive.

I don't personally like exotics or solars because they have itty bitty tiny inventories that require endless grinding for storage augs to make them usable.

[Krash Megiddo]

I use a different main ship in each save. Variety is nice and reminds me which save I'm playing on
E1: Golden Vector
E2: Fan hauler
E3: Exotic specific to E3 with its special gear
E4: Fan hauler
E5: Long nose fighter
E6: Squid
E7: ---
E8: big hauler with fins

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

I use a different main ship in each save. Variety is nice and reminds me which save I'm playing on
E1: Golden Vector
E2: Fan hauler
E3: Exotic specific to E3 with its special gear
E4: Fan hauler
E5: Long nose fighter
E6: Squid
E7: ---
E8: big hauler with fins

I always delete my expedition saves after the expedition ends.

[Foxglovez]

#1 Yellow plainest of guppies & Living ship
#2 Red Royal Guppy & Living ship
#3 Blue Guppy & Living ship
#4 White squid, pink squid & Living ship
Survival Green squid, lavender squid & Living ship
The exotics are really best all around stat-wise but Living ships, now that they have econ/combat scanners are excellent. They cost nothing to run, hit hard, have close to 2800 distance and besides that, they are gaudy. Saves all have other tricked out ships too but mostly that is just to use up nanites. Do like longnose fighters but just for fun.

[frazzled]

I tend to play each save with a mental construct I call "my character." My character most often has a fondness for their starting ship, paying nanites to up its class and augments to fill it out. So, the type of ship I use is often whatever my character started with.

That said, sometimes I decide my character has an objective, and they seek out a ship for that role. Fly to the galaxy center? (Explorer.) Become a feared warrior? (Fighter?) Get filthy, stinking rich? (Hauler.)

My current save started with a shuttle in Expedition 8, whcih was perfect as Exp 8 is all about the freighter and my characters shuttle exists solely to support the freighter in-system. (That shuttle STILL has no hyperdrive, btw.)

[poppetshadow]

I use the Golden Vector unless I'm doing a challenge with no rewards/drops/etc.. in that case I would buy a decent mid-class fighter or an explorer, depending on the goal of the challenge. If I'm not using a freighter, I keep an extra ship (anything with storage space) as a portable cargo storage ship I can call in as needed. My least favorite ships are the ones I can't walk around because of huge wings, or a dorsal fin I can't see through.

[Bored Peon]

Whichever one I find first that does not look like Faecium and has space for:
- Six S Class Photon Cannon upgrades
- Six S Class Pulse Engine upgrades
- Can jump at least 500 light years.

For Expeditions it is the Golden Vector just so I can get it done and back to other saves.

[Stoowox]

S fighter. Hi pira... bye, thanks for money.