Scouts. Ships of this class are used for exploration, ferrying equipment, scanning asteroids and drawing heavy enemy fire in an economical manner.

Stats Overview

* = Maximum able to be obtained by purchased tunings.   These values can be exceeded by using Pandora Tunings.

** = Number of available laser slots in the Main, Front, Left, Right, Up, Down, Back batteries

*** = Ships with data existing in the vanilla game files are listed but some are not available during play without mods or scripts

Functions and applications

M5 scouts function to explore sectors, deploy satellites, transport small loads (like passengers) quickly and to distract high damage but slow projectile speed turrets.   The low cost (and build times in the Player Headquarters) of many M5s mean they can be used as a "rich man's Fighter Drone" and kill even capital ships by swarming them with over 50 PAC or EMPC launching ships.   Out of sector mobbing with swarms of M5s can be quite effective but in sector they suffer from collisions with each other and objects and are vulnerable to weapons with an area of effect severely limiting their effectiveness.   M5 are limited to IREs or EMPCs and weaker dumbfire missiles with some being able to use PACs.   The only M5s able to use heavier lasers are the Harrier and Kestrel variants while only the Advanced Discoverer, Kestrel and Fujin variants can use any effective homing missiles.   Due to the paper thin shielding and hull even a glancing blow from a capital ship weapon can severely cripple or destroy an M5.   With the exception of the Kestrel variants, M5s lack rear turrets making them extremely vulnerable to fast but low damage homing missiles like Hurricane or Wasp missiles.   If used as a player ship scouts are capable of taking down ships up to M6 in class if missiles are used however without missile use even M3s are a challenge as the turrets alone can be fatal.   M5s flown by the player are often used to be able to out speed and out manoeuvre hostile military forces to pass through hostile sectors where slower ships would get overwhelmed.   If stations producing wares that are illegal in sectors owned by a Race are placed in sectors owned by the Race, there is a 1/20 chance NPC M5s of that Race will home in on the station even if outside the scanner range of all other nearby NPC ships and stations.   If an NPC M5 finds an illegal ware producing station it will call the nearest Military Outpost for the sector to be invaded and the station to be destroyed.