Getting Thruster Nuked by "Friendlies"

[Kaz Martell]

This could be intentional for all I know, but I've recently had a couple good dives ended by a ship coming in to repay a debt and sticking around uncomfortably close, to the point where eventually they pull up, flip 180, and hard burn right into my reactor- causing me to explode without much I can do to prevent it. I've tried keeping away from them and they follow me.

This has only been happening with Elon pilots, which is what leads me to believe this might be intended behaviour- asking for a handout, returning to give me a couple hundred credits, then blowing up my ship.

Anybody else having issues like this?

[obliviondoll]

I've seen this happen a few times, and not always from the people repaying debts, and not always Elon ships. Both of those seem to make this behaviour more common, though.

You can see it coming if you're watching for them to approach, and if you hail them again, you normally get the option to ask them "hey, we need some breathing room" before they get close. If they keep coming closer, turn your own main thrusters in their direction, and be ready to burn them first. You could also light them up with weapons fire, if you're ok taking the reputation hit for being an aggressor, which gives you a bit more of a range buffer to chase them off with.

Also worth noting, sometimes when you speak to Vilcy members, they'll ask if you've seen anything weird and one of the answers is "yeah, some idiot tried to fry my ship with their thrusters" so it's definitely an intentional behaviour. I'm not sure it's happening with the kind of variability of who's doing it, or with the right frequency of event trigger, but it seems likely that the behaviour itself is intended even if it might need some tweaks.

[[E] Shrike]

The ai to keep relatively stationary to your ship isn't quite perfect, by design or by complexity (I think by design, since simulating people being bad pilots or just jerks feels very legit for a lawless space).
But the elon ships have their stupidly long fusion torches that have lower thrust (but higher efficiency) so they have to do burns for longer and flick back and forth to try stabilizing their position. This makes them pretty prone to roasting others.

[obliviondoll]

Elon Interstellar Model E pilots are now more aware where their fusion exhaust goes, and are better at avoiding hitting things with that exhaust by accident.

This was in patch notes from 2 weeks ago. But yeah, while they have improved, they still do screw it up. And as mentioned, there's an in-universe reference to it as a deliberate behaviour.