This is hilarious.
Did he pop back up where he was supposed to be or stay in the new spot when the MC elapsed?
because i must not suffer alone - listen carefully as your ship exits hyperspace and arrive at a beacon, there is a sound of a cuckoo bird… cuckooing. once. each and every jump.
The other Rebel Flagship crewmembers ganged up on him and killed him before Mind Control wore off. So I don’t know what would have happened.
Whew. That feeling when you’re running a pure boarding ship, zoltan bypass and all, and you accidentally kill your entire 4-man boarding crew in sector 8 by not paying attention to the enemy’s hull stability. And then you manage to beat the flagship anyways, because the amount of early-game advantage that Mantis B gives you is beyond obscene, and you found a Vulcan in sector 7. Starting to see the appeal to that now. Pro tip for anyone on the last phase of the boss on easy with a small number of crew and decent ship stability (this sounds specific but it isn’t as much as you might think): vent your ship, teleport some dudes to the missile room, and you can completely ignore the boarders. Also, you don’t have to port your guys back - as long as the flagship dies, you’re fine.
It kinda goes without saying, but upgrade your doors or venting the ship won’t do much good. 
Losing your boarding crew because you didn’t notice the enemy ship would explode is THE WORST.
Well firing on the enemy ship with friendlies aboard is a pure Kirk move in the first place. I almost feel ballsy teleporting an ion bomb aboard while boarding, and it does 0 hull or personnel damage. I mean, imagine you’re a boarder fighting strangle aliens to the death barehanded on a hostile craft, and then that ominous bomb teleportation sound goes off right next to you! Damn that captain, what has he done now; he’ll be the death of us all. Then the room fills with ionic charge and you realize, despite the lightshow, you’re safe to continue being eviscerated by some damned Mantis.
I usually send my boarders somewhere other than where I’m firing. Unless my first salvo knocks out the weapons system, in which case I send them there to keep it from being repaired and shoot the medbay or anything else that might prevent my boarders from victory.
From my experience, they just sort of mill around or die before doing any substantial damage.
I know, right? I’m so bad with that sometimes.
I beat it with the Kestrel. Bought an ion mk ii early but it wasn’t working out so well around sector 5 when ships had too much dodge for the ion to reliably take down the shields. So I switched it out for a flak 1 and mind control. After that, it was easy to MC the pilot, use the flak+burst laser 2 +artemis to knock out shields and wreck most ships.
I thought I’d be in great shape for the boss fight if I could just get cloaking. I didn’t manage to get cloaking but did find another flak 1 at a store. So I pushed evasion up to 48, 4 shields, hoped for good RNG, and got it. Fires in the shield room almost every time I hit it, no hits/hack on my weapon system, by phase 3 there were maybe 3 crew left alive on the flagship. I was torn between mind controlling my own guys or the opposing pilot(I also picked up Zoltan bypass somewhere), and ended up hitting my own guy with it. It all worked out somehow, with the flagship only getting off two or three volleys each phase, and none of those wrecked me.
The Mantis B is great, eventually, but God it can be frustrating early on when you encounter drone ships. You can’t board them, since your guys will asphyxiate, and you have no weapon.
If you bump the teleporter up to level two you can get them back off just before they asphyxiate.
Or you could get a clone room. They’ll still asphyxiate, but they won’t mind. Bonus : you’ll also get your dudes back if they get abducted by jerkwad cowards who jumped out before you could get your precious little killing machines home.
How bad is the skill penalty? I never swap out the medbay because people get injured all the time, in hits and fights and suchlike, and I don’t want to lose a double star pilot because I don’t have a medbay
It’s -20%, so yeah, you can’t just keep doing it over and over for your important crew. But melee XP is relatively easy to get (for mantises anyway) and there’s not as huge a difference between a noob brawler mantis and a crack brawler mantis. Pilot XP is relatively easy to grind back up though, be it by fighting a neutered ship in an asteroid field or just zapping them until they have fewer lasers than you have shields, and waiting.
Also the clone room heals everybody a little bit after each jump (I think the amount increases for each upgrade, but I don’t recall for sure right now), so you don’t have to run people out the airlock for every booboo.
I don’t think it increases because it happens even if the clone room is unpowered.
If it’s one of the autoscouts with connected rooms, and you can withstand the enemy weapons, the boarding drone becomes an option. It’ll go from room to room, destroying systems, taking 1 hull point each time. It’ll take a while.
You’re not likely to find a boarding drone before you find a gun though.
There are autoscouts with connected rooms?
Mantis B starts with a boarding drone. Kind of silly but occasionally it can give you the edge in fights against tough encounters with medbay/clone room ships.
Yeah, there are several autoscout layouts. Technically you could defeat a ship with the closed layout this way, but it’d take a while and you’d need to make sure they couldn’t hurt you.