FTL Ship Analysis: Kestrel Cruisers

Kestrel Cruiser A: The Kestrel





1
1
1
x8
3
2
2
1
1


16
8
2


Artemis+Burst Laser II

Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with no Augment.

Room total: 17

The format for these player ship posts should be mostly self-explanatory, but have an explanation anyway, just in case.

We start with a screenshot of the ship as it is in the hangar (ie the ship selection screen), partly because I don't have the know-how to make a 'cleaner' version, and partly because it avoids some annoying inconsistencies that come about from trying to screenshot a ship at the first Beacon of the game. (eg ships that lack Sensors will properly display all rooms in the hangar, but not at that first Beacon) This way the reader has a direct visual reference of the ship's layout, including elements like its external door placement.

Then we have crew icons. This represents the species composition you'll start with if you pick the given ship, and nothing more; the exact combinations of graphics I used for each ship are based on my whims and occasional agendas. They are not a depiction of what colors/Human genders you'll start with, and in fact the game randomizes this each time you change what ship you're looking at in-game. That is, if you click into the Kestrel Cruiser A here, then click into a different ship, then decide you'd rather do the Kestrel Cruiser A after all, the exact graphics (And names) the ship's crew will generate with on that second look is different from the first look.

Then we have the assorted (Sub)System icons plus a Power bar with numbers beside them: this represents what a given ship starts with and what the initial level of these (Sub)Systems is, with the Power bar standing in for the Reactor level since the Reactor doesn't have its own icon.

Then we have Fuel, Missile Ammo, and Drone Parts icons: this is how much a given ship starts with of each, as it varies from ship to ship. (And, annoyingly, is not even slightly visible at the ship selection stage) The Fuel point is arguably unnecessary as it actually never varies at all, but these pages are meant to be friendlier to people just looking at the ship they're currently thinking of playing or the like rather than being as strictly written as 'you read all the prior posts in this series, right?'

Then you get weapon and/or Drone icons and names -the latter partly for general clarity reasons, but also because FTL simply has too many cases of graphics being shared across multiple weapons.

Then there's the maximum weapon/Drone count: the standard or default is the Kestrel Cruiser A's setup of 4 weapons at max and 2 Drones at max, but a few ships are Drone-focused, taking away a weapon slot in exchange for a Drone slot, and a few others are just... directly disadvantaged, giving up a weapon slot with no obvious exchange made elsewhere.

Most ships start with an Augment, though the Kestrel Cruiser A does not. I directly note such, of course.

Lastly, requiring a bit more of an explanation is 'room total': one might wonder why I'd bother to note this at all, given it has no obvious mechanical reason to matter. (Or possibly you're raising an eyebrow because the room count is already visible thanks to the screenshot, either way) This is true in a direct sense, and in a hypothetical player-vs-player version of FTL it would matter much less, but in actual FTL the AI always picks random rooms to target per-shot: this has the result that a ship's room count directly affects the probability of something actually important being shot.

In turn, this means that a ship's room count is actually an invisible component of its average performance: the fewer rooms a ship has, the more likely it is for shots slipping through to cause serious problems, because maximum (Sub)System count is fixed and so every room past 12 (8 Systems plus the 4 Subsystems) is increasing the odds the enemy fires into an empty room instead of a (Sub)System's room.

As FTL allows the room count to vary from as few as 14 rooms to as many as 19 rooms, there's genuinely a pretty noticeable gap in average performance between 'lowest possible room count' and 'highest possible room count'. Arguably I should also be explicitly including the number of rooms occupied by (Sub)Systems to start, actually, but that's less clear a point. For example, all ships have the Weapons System installed, but there are multiple ships that don't actually start with any weapons: if you had two ships where their Systems were the same except one dumped its starting weapons in exchange for a Crew Teleporter, the Crew Teleporter ship would have have enemy shots hit an empty room a little less often in a strict sense but initially any hits on the Weapons System would effectively be the same as hitting an empty room -or arguably better than hitting an empty room, since a damaged System is an opportunity for Repair experience, and there's the (rare) possibility of the AI using a Hull Beam, where hitting a currently-useless System results in the player's ship taking less Hull damage with no effect on immediate combat performance.

But raw room count is genuinely, on average, an important component of ship expected performance: if you play FTL a lot, you will in fact find that having a high room count is a non-trivial factor in success rate.

Anyway, explanations done, onto the Kestrel Cruiser known as The Kestrel.

Yes, the first representative of the Kestrel Cruiser category is, itself, named 'The Kestrel'. This is one of several reasons why I insist throughout these posts on referring to player ships as (overall name) Cruiser (A/B/C): so when I'm referring to a specific ship, there is no 'wait, is The Kestrel as in the category overall, or as in the A variant in particular?' (Also, you can actually change the ship name for a run; these names are just the defaults)

In any event, the Kestrel Cruiser A is your introduction to the game, the only ship you start with and thus is guaranteed to be used by all players at least once, and almost guaranteed to see use more than once. It's also reasonably accurate as an intro to 'normality' for player ships, in that a lot of its initial parameters clearly represent a dev baseline. For example, its Reactor starts with 8 bars, and most ships start within 1 of that, with most of the exceptions arriving at a similar total amount of Power, just some of it coming from other sources.

It is, sadly, a pretty bad ship overall. Starting with three Human crew is a poor start right there; the max the game offers at start is four, and Humans are the species with the least reason to want one in your crew, and by far the most common to boot. To whatever extent you might want Humans in your crew, most runs will inevitably end up with events foisting free Humans onto them, no need to start with Humans.

The Kestrel Cruiser A starting with no Augment is also unusual; most ships start with an Augment, and while many of those Augments are pretty underwhelming they at least can be sold for an injection of Scrap, helping you to cover key purchases early in a run. Not having one is another weakness.

The Artemis Missile Launcher is honestly also something of a trap. Your starting missile ammo supply is very limited, and the Burst Laser II can handle every enemy ship on its own in the early game, often with you taking no Hull damage. The Artemis should be reserved for duties like knocking Weapons back out if a missile launcher gets brought back online with such timing it'll get to attack before the Burst Laser II can knock it out again, if you use it at all. Make sure to slide the Burst Laser II to the left at the start of each run so damage to Weapons doesn't automatically knock out your Burst Laser II; it's better to have the Artemis depowered than the Burst Laser II.

Indeed, you should probably sell the Artemis at some point, especially if it will let you cover the cost of a different, more useful weapon. The ability to bypass Shields is nice and all, but it's better to get more overall overwhelming firepower if at all possible, and starting with a Burst Laser II means it's pretty easy to get such overwhelming firepower.

The Burst Laser II itself is very much the main thing the Kestrel Cruiser A has going for it, being one of the best weapons of the game, and pricy enough that even if you spot it in a Store you won't necessarily be able to afford it; having one right out the gate is legitimately a notable advantage over a number of other ships.

Keep in mind that its expense means it sells well. You shouldn't sell it as a default, but if your run ends up shaping to have a divergent strategy end up more viable than the straightforward stacking of good lasers/flak, such as ending up with a great crew for boarding and an opportunity to buy a Crew Teleporter, liquidating the Burst Laser II can let you complete such a strategy pretty readily, which may be what lets a run actually make it to the end.

A more mild positive is that the Kestrel Cruiser A's layout is okay, with its primary flaw being that you have venting but it's positioned poorly for defending rooms that matter. It would be better if it was more compact, but it only has a couple of chokepoints -Weapons and the room just behind Piloting- so your crew can almost always route around fires and breaches, and all your unmanned Systems and Subsystems are right next to your manned Systems, making it pretty painless to pop out and repair System damage, fight fires, and fend off boarders, and thus minimize the consequences of all those.

Overall, the Kestrel Cruiser A could easily be worse, but it's a pretty rough start for the game. A new player is liable to have quite a few runs of just the Kestrel Cruiser A, as it's pretty easy to die early with it even if you know what you're doing; I imagine quite a few players get sick of playing the Kestrel Cruiser A before managing to unlock an alternative.

If you get over that hump, unlocking another ship via event, getting far enough to unlock the Engi Cruiser A, or pulling off enough Achievements to unlock the Kestrel Cruiser B, things get better... mostly... but this is still awkward design.

Oh, as for Achievements, FTL has... quite a few Achievements, but the ones that actually matter are ship-specific: each overclass of ship has three Achievements associated with it, and getting any two of those three will unlock the B variant of that ship category. Note that these Achievements always require you do them with the ship overclass to count; The United Federation won't trigger if you get a diverse crew on an Engi Cruiser, it has to be a Kestrel Cruiser. Conversely, you don't actually need to be in the A variant in particular for these Achievements... but this isn't mechanically important, since you can't unlock the B and C variants without getting two Achievements, and getting all three of a ship's Achievements has no mechanical benefit. So actually, in practice you do need to be in the A variant in particular to benefit.

As for the Kestrel Cruiser's Achievements...

The United Federation

Have six different species of crew aboard your ship.

The game says 'aliens', but this is not some subtle implication that Humans don't count or anything. Just... poor wording.

Due to how crew access is defined heavily by Sector type -both for Store access and for random crew generation from eg pirate slaver ships- in practice this Achievement heavily pressures you to go through a variety of Sectors. This isn't strictly necessary, as it's possible for a Zoltan, Abandoned, or Nebula Sector to singlehandedly generate a full six species, but this is pretty unlikely.

In practice, you should mostly prioritize hitting Zoltan Sectors, Nebula Sectors, and Abandoned Sectors, as Lanius can only generate in Abandoned Sectors, while Slugs can generate in any of these but are only actually common in Nebula Sectors. And unless you luck into getting a Crystal, you need a Slug or Lanius to reach six different species -there's only five 'common' species.

Aggravatingly, Slugs and Lanius are both at best tied with Humans for commonality. It's very easy to hit one of their Sectors and just... never even see them in Stores, let alone actually acquire one. As such, this is very much a luck-based mission. The only good news is that you can see Nebula Sectors on the Sector map right away (Just go for the purple Sectors) and so plot a route to maximize your chances at Slugs that way -and Nebula Sectors can get you any of the common Species, too, so there's good odds you'll get one or more of those as well.

To be honest, you may wish to just wait until you have the Kestrel Cruiser C, as it starts with a Lanius, making it much easier to pull this off. Assuming you care about getting 100%, anyway.

In any event, within a run it's largely intuitive enough what kinds of Sectors to go for if you've got a specific gap. Need an Engi? Try an Engi Sector. Need a Rockman? Try a Rockman-controlled Sector. Etc.

Though keep in mind that Engi and Rockman Sectors are actually the worst Sectors to route through for this Achievement overall, as they each have only three possible species, one of which is Humans, one of which is Zoltan, and the third is their own species of course. If all you need is a Rockman and one of your options for your next Sector Jump is a Rockman-controlled Sector, go right ahead, but if you're sitting on just your starting three Humans... probably avoid those Sectors if you can.

Full Arsenal

Have a total of 11 Systems/Subsystems installed and Powered.

The intent here is to have the Kestrel fully upgraded, as you have 3 empty System slots to fill, but the Backup Battery introduced by advanced edition actually counts toward your total, and thus it's possible to trigger this Achievement while having an empty System slot.

This isn't precisely a hard Achievement to unlock, but it is a slightly different mentality from just playing to win, as FTL isn't really designed under the assumption an endgame kit has filled out all System slots. If you're just trying to get the Achievement without worrying overly-much about possibly trashing the run as a result, go for the cheaper options: the Backup Battery, of course, followed by two of Mind Control, Hacking, or Drone Control. (Drone Control is cheaper than Hacking if it comes with a Combat Drone, but more expensive if it comes with a Defense Drone)

If you're wanting to get the Achievement while also going for a win, well, just grab what makes sense, and maybe grab a Backup Battery if you end up at a Store offering it while 1 System away from triggering the Achievement. If you play Kestrel Cruisers enough, it'll happen eventually.

Also note that you have to actually invest Power into all the Systems for it to count. This isn't the same thing as using the System, except in the case of Drone Control and Weapons, and it's perfectly fine to eg have inadequate Power to run everything at full functionality, so you can trigger the Achievement by pulling some Power from Shields or Engines or whatever to bring other stuff online -you don't even need to be in combat.

Tough Little Ship
Repair from 1 Hull to 30 Hull in one beacon.

The straightforward way to do this is to get knocked down to 1 Hull, then jump to a Store and click the Repair All button.

However, the game will also accept repairing in increments, including repairing with a Hull Repair Drone, so long as the repairs all occur without you changing Beacons. As such, if you get a Drone Control, a decent number of Drone Parts, and a Hull Repair Drone, you can do this safely after a fight without needing a pile of Scrap. Similarly, if you get an event that repairs you and you were at 1 Hull before the repairs kicked in, you can follow up with further repairs to get the Achievement, either by virtue of the repairs being associated with a Store opening (This is a possible event), or by following up with Hull Repair Drone usage.

To be honest, it's entirely possible you'll earn this Achievement incidentally while learning the game.

If you don't and are sick of trying to get The United Federation, though, it's pretty easy to earn Tough Little Ship through... cheesy methods. Deliberately letting a ship with extremely limited firepower knock you down to 1 Hull while you're one Jump from a Store and have 58 or so Scrap to cover repair costs, for example, or getting a hold of a Fire Bomb and using it at a Store beacon to knock your Hull down via fires knocking out Systems to then do repairs.

I'm not a fan of this Achievement overall, mostly because it's tied into the Achievements-to-unlock-ships mechanic, particularly the part where all such Achievements are ship-specific; Tough Little Ship would be intrusive to few, if any players if it was ship-agnostic, as anyone who played the game long enough would probably have it happen at some point just... naturally. Having it attached to the Kestrel Cruiser set in particular means you can have it happen multiple times across runs, but whoops they were the wrong ships so it doesn't count.

It doesn't help that honestly the mechanics of the game actively discourage fully repairing your ship yourself, as there's multiple events that provide some free repairs, and if you're at full Hull when you get such an event you're not compensated with Scrap or anything of the sort.

Anyway, now we move onto what gets unlocked by doing two of these three Achievements...

Kestrel Cruiser B: Red-Tail





1
1
1
x8
4
2
2
1
1


16
5
0


Basic Laser*4

Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with no Augment.

Room total: 15

Four Basic Lasers at first glance seems really terrible, but it's surprisingly solid. You will need to replace some by the end of the game, or at least supplement them with Drone Control or Hacking (Or both), but for a long time they're very widely effective, and one of the big advantages of the setup is that it trains Weapons skill insanely fast; it's not unusual to have your Weapons crew maxed out before you've even left the first Sector!

Even aside that, though, it's plenty for punching through Shields, lets you spread the damage around to lock down multiple Systems, regularly starts fires, volleys so rapidly enemy ships don't necessarily get the chance to attack before they're losing Systems (Annoyingly, basic missiles fire barely fast enough you can't actually stop them -I've literally watched Basic Lasers arrive the same second a missile was fired... with crew at max Weapons experience!), and can even occasionally grab crewkills. It's also very resistant to System damage; having a stray laser hit Weapons can be annoying for de-synching your barrages, requiring some fiddling to re-synch them, but it's almost never a disaster, unlike some of the later ships we'll be covering.

There's also a lot of non-obvious strategic benefits. You start at Weapons 4, which is an important number to be at as so many good weapons demand 2 Power, and the pile of Basic Lasers means you can basically always immediately benefit from a Weapons upgrade if you've swapped some Basic Lasers for other weapons (eg you swap out two Basic Lasers, then later upgrade Weapons and add one back in), where normally you struggle to up your firepower because you really need 2 or even 3 Weapons upgrades to slot in your next weapon.

Similarly, the sheer number of projectiles you're outputting from right away makes the Kestrel Cruiser B much more prone than any other ship to shooting down enemy external Drones. This is unreliable in its relevance, but can be nice if eg you encounter an early Shield Overcharger Drone.

Additionally, while Basic Lasers only sell for 5 Scrap, it's easy to justify swapping out a Basic Laser and selling it, since you start with all your weapon slots filled; there is no 'maybe I should hold onto this' there, especially if eg you replace a Basic Laser with a Heavy Laser I. (Which uses as much Power, charges just as quickly, yet hits twice as hard; a straightforward improvement) 

That's just how amazing four Basic Lasers is, note. The layout is also shockingly good, extraordinarily effective at using venting to deal with boarders and fires, and only the front 'neck' area with Door Control and Piloting suffers from chokepointing. Oxygen and Door Control are slightly inconvenient in their positioning, but on the other hand Oxygen is a 2x2 room and so easier to repair in a hurry, as well as fight fires before they get chaotic and overwhelm boarders. A lot of ships have to be constantly wary of the possibility of Oxygen getting broken and this snowballing, possibly turning into a game over via crewkill. (Or an unwinnable state where your crew is trapped in the Medical Bay, unable to leave to repair Oxygen even though they can't suffocate to death thanks to the healing) That can happen with the Kestrel Cruiser B, but it really requires you outright be careless, a lot more so than with other ships.

The crew is also larger and more diverse than with the Kestrel Cruiser A, giving it a stronger start and better odds of blue options paying out.

The Kestrel Cruiser B is honestly one of the best ships in the game, a striking contrast to the A variant being fairly bad. Its primary flaw is that it's dependent on luck with strategic RNG to actually reach a state of being able to defeat the Rebel Flagship, but that's one of the most common flaws with player ships, and my complaints on that topic are much more focused on the game's overall design than they are on the ships that have this flaw.

The Kestrel Cruiser B is also pretty fun, surprisingly, simply due to four Basic Lasers requiring a lot more engagement than some strategies, where you can and should be adjusting firepower distribution with each wave of shots rather than just watching your strategy play out with no involvement from you.

Reaching Sector 8 (ie the last one) with the Kestrel Cruiser B with advanced edition content on will unlock the Kestrel Cruiser C. This is how all C variants work: reach Sector 8 with the B variant with advanced edition content enabled. It's very good that you don't actually need to beat the Rebel Flagship to unlock the C variant, because some of the B variant ships are quite terrible at beating the Rebel Flagship.

So onto that C variant.

Kestrel Cruiser C: The Swallow





1
1
2
x7
2
2
2
1
1


16
4
3


Dual Lasers+Ion Stunner

Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with no Augment.

Room total: 18

The Kestrel Cruiser C is, like all C variant ships, content added by the advanced edition update, and so for one thing cannot be played with advanced edition turned off.

It's also sadly pretty representative of the C ships: you'd think advanced edition ships would tend to be put together with a tighter understanding of what's good and what's unbearably atrocious than base-game content, but in actuality C variant ships have a pretty high rate of being bizarrely awful.

So for starters I can draw a fairly direct comparison to the Kestrel Cruiser A and be baffled at how dramatic a drop in quality we're looking at. Both the A and C start with a multi-shot laser and a secondary weapon to, among other points, help break through heavier Shields, but where the Burst Laser II is unequivocally one of the best weapons in the game, Dual Lasers are... okay. No, an Ion Stunner is not particularly synergistic with it, either. It's got more sustainability than the Artemis the Kestrel Cruiser A starts with, but that's not very helpful when you're going to struggle to survive the early game long enough to benefit from that improved long-term functionality.

The layout is extremely similar to the Kestrel Cruiser A, and the differences largely boil down to being worse, with Oxygen harder to defend and your medical unit harder to quickly bring significant force to defend/repair. (Because Shields has been moved to the back, so only your pilot is in easy reach of the Cloning Bay) The only significant improvement is the ability to instantly vent Engines in an emergency, which doesn't really make up for the big flaws added in.

Bizarrely, the Kestrel Cruiser C starts with Sensors upgraded. On the plus side, there is an event that can occur in the initial Civilian Sector that upgraded Sensors provides a blue event for, but overall this is just intensely baffling; you're extraordinarily unlikely to manage a crewkill with your initial weaponry, you don't have boarding, you don't start with Mind Control or even Hacking... what's supposed to be the point of this? Making it particularly egregious is that the Kestrel Cruiser C starts with one less Power, due entirely to the ship design conceit being that player ships normally start with precisely one less Power than it would take to run every System at full power; put another way, if the devs had decided to have the Kestrel Cruiser C start with Sensors 1 but Engines 3, they would've also thrown in an extra Power for free.

Reminder: taking Sensors from 1 to 2 takes 25 Scrap. Taking Engines from 2 to 3 plus upgrading the Reactor from 7 to 8 costs 35 Scrap in total. Starting with better Engines and more Power would actually be consistently useful from right out the gate, unlike upgraded Sensors, in addition to the Scrap differential!

Having Door Control pre-upgraded would also have been more sensical. It would've been Scrap-equivalent to the Engines+Power upgrade, it would've been immediately useful in general, and crucially it would've actually synergized with starting with a Lanius, making it harder for boarders to escape the Lanius oxygen drain. It wouldn't have been great, but I'd have understood the thought process, at least. I'm intensely baffled by this ship having Sensors pre-upgraded.

Speaking of the Lanius, it's... not great. I suspect the idea is that you'll put it in Engines (Certainly, that's where the game defaults to placing them) and be ready to vent the room on a moment's notice, but for one thing this comes back to the 'Door Control being level 2 would've made more sense' issue, and for another that's not a particularly optimal assignment. The Lanius is the single least likely member of the crew to die and thus suffer the cloning skill penalty; assigning them to Weapons or Shields, which both require huge amounts of experience and are thus set back quite badly by the skill penalty from dying, makes far more sense than Engines, which can train fairly quickly if you've got Engines decently upgraded.

I'd sooner assign them to Weapons and then vent atmosphere from basically everything that isn't the Pilot seat or back near Engines -and get the Door Control upgraded early, so boarders can't just run straight to Piloting. After all, the Lanius can repair the Oxygen System if it gets smashed without worrying about suffocating, and the Cloning Bay means I can be a bit careless -or callous- about endangering the Human crew with it actually being pretty unlikely to have disastrous consequences. And this whole setup would minimize the dangers from fires and boarders.

Even so, such a setup has its problems, and if you don't do something of that sort, a lone Lanius is... a bit clunky of a crewmember, with poor movement speed and somewhat narrow advantages. 

The one bit of the ship's design I actually like, where it might look strange at first glance, is that the ship starts with some Drone Parts and Missile ammo in spite of having no initial use for both. This is nice because it's actually pretty common for events to let you trade in those resources for other benefits; the fact that ships only reliably have those resources if they have the ability to spend them in combat creates a perverse situation where early such events can be reliably used by the ships that shouldn't want to take advantage, rather than the ships that appreciate being able to cash out stuff they aren't using anyway.

It's too bad the advanced edition update didn't spread this idea around to the already-designed ships...

So yeah. If you're considering playing the Kestrel Cruiser C, playing to win and, honestly, playing for fun both tend to boil down to 'play the Kestrel Cruiser A instead'. Which you of course always have access to no matter what, where you have to jump through multiple hoops to unlock the C.

The C ships usually aren't this egregious, admittedly, but it's pretty bizarre (Not to mention frustrating; all those hoops to jump through, and then often the payoff is a ship I really shouldn't be playing?) that I can accurately state this is a trend at all.

-----------------------

Next time, we cover the Engi Cruisers, as getting a Kestrel Cruiser to Sector 5 will unlock the Engi Cruiser A.

See you then.