Appendium:
It is important that you kill the gunboats. If you try and cheese your way through this encounter by not killing the gunboats, you screw up the corvette spawn for other people. The gunboats will travel to the exit point and loiter there until someone kills them. Until someone does kill them, the corvette will not respawn. (The corvette Respawn timer is 2 hours.) To put it plainly, if you can't kill a couple gunboats, you are no Ace by any stretch of the imagination or use of the word. This guide tells you how to kill them, there is no excuse NOT to kill the gunboats.


Step by step:
1.) Wait
4000 meters or so from the spawn waypoint, when it spawns, let all the ships settle down and get into formation and start their flight path.


2.) Draw the fighters:
Get them away from the corvette/gunboat formation and kill them all.
- Kill the T/I's, T/A's and T/O's first. JOUST the aggressors either first, or last, depending on how much their hitting you. As long as you dont get directly behind an aggressor, i find them not much more than annoying, its getting behind one that sucks, so joust them unless your feeling confident with them.

***Note: Steps 2 and 3 are acutally interchangable in the case of privateers as the whole formation is yellow to you until you hit one of them. So it acutally makes sense to hit turret 5 first, then drag the fighters away. So if their still yellow to you, do step 3 before step 2. However if their red to you for whatever reason before you destroy turret 5, then follow the steps as listed. Step two, then three. ***


3.) Destroy turret number 5.
Come in directly UNDER the vette, target turret 5 and do a strafing run. You could also try torpedo's, but i find aquiring a missle lock takes a bit too long. Make sure you have CTSS4 ready incase you get hit..


4.) Kill the gunboats:
The Imperial gunboats are acutally easy to kill once you know where the blindspot is.
That blindspot is acutally the same location as rebel gunboats, only the blindspot its a tad narrower. Come in from UNDER and BEHIND the gunboat, and *almost* to the center of its underbelly. The foward gun turrets firing arc ends about there, and the rear turret seems to have about a 20 degree downward firing arc.

***** In action, all this means is if you cant disable the engines quickly, you'll have to scoot foward a bit and reposition yourself before you come into the rear gun turrets firing arch. Other than that, theres NO DIFFERENCE between a rebel or imperial gunboat*******

Killing an imperial gunboat is about as easy as a rebel gunboat. They fly in formation and never break it. So NO EXCUSES, kill them. Again, if you can't take these out, KNOWING where to approach them from (and i just told you) you don't deserve the ace title.



5.) Kill the Vette:
Now you have to destroy the vette. If it has remaing turrets or not is of little consquence as long as you stay under and behind the corvette at all times. With your Missle launcher, shoot at the following components, it each takes two missles to destroy.

-Primary Shield
-Secondary shield

This will expose the Engine. Your already in position, shoot it out with blasters. Now shoot two more missles at the Reactor, and then the bridge. No, dont manuever around, stay where you are under and behind the corvette. Missles apparenly do not require line of sight.

KABOOM, no more corvette.

Credits to Repax Victis