It’s sooo pretty!!

I’ve seen a lot of different information and speculation on upgrading interceptors. I wanted to gather some hard data for my own information. I was pretty suprised at the results.

To run this test, I found a “nice” corrupted sentinel planet within a 3-tier economy. My game settings were all standard/mid-range settings, I adjusted on-foot encounters up one notch to get more sentinel spawn for battles.

With every ship I claimed, I dismantled all combat technology aside from the sentinel cannon and I made sure no technology modules were sitting within any supercharged slots. Each ship’s stats on the spreadsheet are completely unmodified.

After claiming a hanger-full of ships, I went through the process of upgrading each to S-class level and then scrapping them. I kept one S-class ship that ended up with 3 adjacent supercharged slots once upgraded, I intend to compare it’s modified damage output to the naturally generated S-class ship I found with no adjacent SC slots.

I had intended to claim and upgrade 6 of each class, but when I started upgrading the first 3 C-class ships I immediately noticed a pattern. Each upgrade, regardless of the starting stats, would produce the exact same result.

This confirms something I read on a post that claimed each system had one seed for the interceptor, which had the same stats for each level. The only exception is when you find a procedurally generated ship, the class level it’s at can potentially have higher stats than the seed version.

When you look at the chart, each grouping of data starts with the ship at the class it was found. Each following row of data shows the stats as the ship was upgraded at the Space Station.

I used the following legend for the naming convention of the ship classes in column 1:

[class][natural vs upgrade][ship version or upgrade amount]

eg:

[C][nat][01] – C-class, naturally generated, first ship found
[B][up][1] – B-class, upgraded 1 time

The highest damage potential I found was on the naturally generated S-class ship. I was hoping to find at least 2 more to see if I could find an S-class ship that had lower damage stats than the seed.

Out of around 100 interceptor crash sites I visited, I only discovered 1 S-class ship. This was massively disappointing, and I tried real damn hard to find another S-class. I spent around 6 hours hours trying to find just one more S-class ship, but all camps, dreadnaught AIs and direct combat with corrupted sentinels kept returning me to locations of ships I’d already found.

I don’t believe there is only one naturally ocurring S-class interceptor per planet, but I would appreciate if someone could verify that for me.

In conclusion, I want to say that the highest damage potential interceptor you will find will be a naturally generated S-class ship. However, since I was only able to find 1, I am going to have to say this isn’t confirmed. That said, if you find an S-class ship and want to see if it’s stats are higher than the seed, find an A-class and upgrade it to see what the S-class seed stats are.

Good luck and happy hunting =]

https://preview.redd.it/e61iekgw3w4b1.jpg?width=771&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d5c7f2457bffb44a57e996ac63ab372ad5dc3721