K

Summary


The K fills the Xenon Destroyer capital ship role and is one of two reasons why an X4 game will always end-up with a combat element to it, no matter how hard the player attempts to avoid combat in their game. Currently we are not able to puchase ships or construct or pilot any Xenon ships without mods or hacks but in the encyclopedia it does seam to offer space for one crew (pilot) and it does list its construction material, potentially allowing for implementation later-on as with X3.

Do not be fooled into thinking fighting a Xenon K will be as easy as fighting even a Xenon P with a couple of escorts. Xenon capital ships pack a punch with large turrets that can lay waste to stations with even reasonably good defences. In fact one of the first signs of a Xenon capital appearence is frequently the rate at which a station outside of your active view on the map appears to be losing hull. To make matters worse, the Xenon K often appears with a sizeable swarm of smaller Xenon subcapital fighters including P gunships and a lot of M heavy fighters. Another way that the Xenon K can be a real problem is if one appears as support to a Xenon I.

These ships can be handled in one of four ways
 * 1) Place Defence Stations with a lot of Plasma turrets (since they do a lot of damage but their poor tracking speed doesn't matter against ships of this size) at strategic points that matter to you in game. As this is the equivalent of completing a Defence Station deployment mission for a faction and those are rated as hard (as much due to the cost as anything else) - you won't be doing this too early on. However it does have the advantage of stoipping you having to destroy every Xenon capital ship that turns-up, which is frequently once you get not even that far in to a game.
 * 2) Build your own Destroyers and use them as a mobile version of the option above. Again, expensive but more flexible. Obviously there's a real risk you'll lose ships (or credits if you see it that way), particularly as Xenon capitals pack a real punch for their hull size, as do all Xenon ships.
 * 3) Build one gunship. (I find the Paranid Nemesis Vanguard is good for this but you can use anything, I cannot say there's a bad choice here apart from taking on a capital with it) I actually build two or even more and then have the others dock in system. Now you can personally take the ship out by flying the gunship into a blind spot and using the ship's own inertia to assist with strafing it with fire. You can't take it out this way because the shields are too strong but you can pick-off all of the modules one-by-one. Once it has no engines and no guns you can call in the rest of your gunships and take the main shields down the the hull is very weak underneath.
 * 4) Ignore Xenon capitals completely. They will move-on sooner or later, it just takes a long time and they may move on to station you like second having just destroyed your favourite one. This choice isn't really practical for a simple reason - if you ever want to build your own base these Xenon attacks can happen to you too and simply dropping a lot (trust me, I've tried) of laser towers won't stop these ships. Even mine fields have minimal effect on them.

Production
As previously mentioned it is not possible to produce or capture xenon ships but the encyclopedia still lists its construction material
 * 2908x Energy Cell
 * 2437x Ore
 * 2447x Silicon