Since we have some military strike zones to grind extra merits on this week I wanted to pass along a couple tips.

Don't fly what you can't rebuy: This advice applies to all aspects of the game, not just military strikes. If you can't afford the insurance on your ship, you can't afford to fly it. Don't lose all of your hard work because you were too lazy to grind some insurance credits before flying off to do something dangerous.

"All power to shields, Scotty": Shields recharge slowly and get eaten up fast, so protect them! Throwing 4 pips to shields dramatically increases the amount of punishment they can take. In military/combat zones you're going to regret lazy power management. Take advantage of being able to store power in the various capacitors. If an enemy wants to go head to head then throw 4 pips into shields and 2 into weapons and drain your weapons capacitor dry, then throw 4 pips to weapons after the pass while you're looping back around. Don't waste power on full capacitors and never let yourself take punishment without throwing 4 pips into shields! SCBs are great for making up for a few "oopsies" but you'll run out of charges quickly if you're using them as a crutch to make up for bad power management.

Let me see that magazine, soldier: There's nothing sadder than limping back to base with a full rack of ammo. In RES it pays to be frugal, but in strike zones it's not the time to hold on to ammo. Unload all you have because you never know how long your trip is going to last before you need to head back to restock/repair. Strike zones are all about speed and effectiveness, not efficiency.

Don't chafe over chaff: When your enemy pops chaff it can be pretty annoying if you're running gimbals, but fret not because there's a way around! If you un-target your enemy your gimballed weapons default back to a fixed position, allowing you to manually target your enemy. Just don't lose track of who you were shooting at because you'll want to re-target them when their chaff is up so that you can go back to using your gimballed weapons at full effectiveness.

Be a bully: There's no need to be a one person army when you're in a combat zone. Pick the winning side. Go to where all the green triangles are ganging up on one sorry red triangle and join in the beat down. You get the same 10 merits regardless of whether you did all 100% hull damage or just the last 1%. Just keep in mind that you need to be within 3 km of your target when they die to get credit!

One shot, one kill: Unlike RES and combat zones, military strike zones offer a flat rate of 10 merits per kill regardless of kill type. Don't waste your time chasing after every big ship when you're going to get the same reward for a Viper Mk III as you will from a Python.

Ride alone, die alone: It's easy to get caught up in the chase and end up away from the main fight. This is how you get into trouble. What looks like empty space at a given moment can quickly get filled by newly spawning enemies. If there aren't other Hudson ships around, now all those new ships are targeting YOU. Your 1v1 Netflix and Chill with that Viper just turned into a non-consensual gangbang. Stick close to the green crowd even if it means abandoning the chase on some targets.

Stop being an asphole: Some rocket scientist at FDev decided to equip NPC Asps with rail guns. For those of you who haven't flown with rails, the main drawback of them is that they're slow to fire and hard to aim. Fortunately for our NPC Asp friends they seem to have lost both of those "checks and balances" on railguns and have been granted never-miss, instant-charge railguns. FEAR THE ASP. If you hear that familiar sound of an Asp traumatizing your virgin exhaust ports on your 6, do not ignore this. 4 pips to shields, drop what you're doing, pull a 180, and scatter that Asp.

"Run Forrest, run!": If you think you're outmatched or even suspect that you're going to be outmatched, RUN. NPCs can't see your shame. There's no point trying to grind out a tough fight when you can just as easily leave and reset the battle on your own terms, which leads us to...

Rage quit: Any time you leave and re-enter a military strike (at least on solo) it will reset the combat instance. If your team is losing then leave. There's no point sticking around for a losing fight when you can leave and get a fresh set of NPCs to see if the fight will go Hudson's way next time. Winning fights are profitable ones, and you'll rack up way more merits by mopping up half-killed enemies than flying defensively while getting shot at by half the galaxy in a losing battle.

The best offense is a good defense: Don't forget to fortify! Combat is fun, but President Hudson needs all of his commanders to pitch in on the dirty work so that we can make sure that the home front stays safe too.

-Edit, a couple more to add-

She's a brick house: Fully combat-kitting your ship can be expensive ordeal, but there's a lot of ways that you can improve your survivability temporarily on the cheap:

1) Shield boosters: A grade shield boosters can be a bit pricey at 281k, but C grade shield boosters still provide good benefit (12% boost to shields compared to 20% for A grade) for a fraction of the cost at 53k and even D grade boosters are worth swapping in at 23k for an 8% boost to replace any scanner-type utility mounts that are useless in strike zones.

2) Hull reinforcement: You're not going to be hauling any cargo when you're in a strike zone, so adding in some hull reinforcement to temporarily swap in for cargo racks can vastly improve your ability to take a beating. 3D hull reinforcement adds 260 hull for 84k and 3E adds 230 hull for 28k. Especially since cargo racks are so cheap to swap back in later this is a no-brainer before flying into a fight. There's no excuse for flying into a combat zone without some kind of hull reinforcement. It's a cheap way to MASSIVELY increase your ability to survive. Even swapping in undersized reinforcement (i.e. putting a 3E into a size 4 or 5 compartment) is worth doing to add lots of strength to your hull. A 3E hull reinforcement kit for 28k credits adds more health to your ship than a stock Cobra Mk IV has coming off of the factory line at 513k.

3) Shield cell banks: A little more expensive than hull reinforcement for increasing your survivability, but a vital part of any shield tank combat build. Shields recharge slower than a herd of snails moving through peanut butter in E:D so having a way to recharge them quickly is a major bonus if you want to stick around in a combat zone for any appreciable amount of time. SCBs generate a metric shit-ton of heat when you use them so don't pop them off right after you've been laying on the trigger unless you want to take a lot of heat damage. Heat sinks can help in offsetting the heat spike, but you can get away without them if you time the use of your SCBs well and don't pick a SCB size too large for your ship's ability to bleed off heat. I'll often pop them off when maneuvering after a head-to-head since I know there will be a small break before I have my target lined up again to do any shooting.

You can't pay your bills with IOUs: Cash in your merits frequently. Don't add the heartbreak of losing a few thousand merits on top of losing your ship if you get trashed in a strike zone. This is a dangerous activity. Plan for the possibility that any trip to a strike zone might end with your claims getting reset. You can cash in your merits at any Hudson control system, you don't need to fly all the way back to Nanomam to turn them in.

It's all about the thrust, baby: If you're not using your lateral/vertical thrusters (QERF on standard mouse and keyboard setup) in combat you're only using half of the maneuverability of your ship. And as always, keep in mind that your ship turns fastest in the blue zone of your speed indicator. Just like power management, adjusting your throttle on the fly to match the situation is the key to getting the most out of your ship in combat.

A warm welcome: Whether through glitch or intentionally, the NPCs in strike zones seem to disproportionately target you for the first 5-10 seconds that you jump in before they start falling into fights with the other Hudson ships in the area. Always jump into a strike zone with 4 pips in shields to ride out the initial blitz.

Diversify your portfolio: Unless you're running a ship with very limited hardpoint options (like the Vulture) you're going to benefit from having a good mix of thermal and kinetic type weapons. Each brings their own advantages to the table and having both at your disposal makes you more dangerous in a fight. Thermal weapons are great at taking down shields and don't require ammo, but they burn through capacitor charge quickly and generate a lot of heat. Kinetic weapons are great at taking down hull and pull very little from your capacitor charge, but they have ammo and will need to periodically stop firing to reload. Picking which weapons to use at what times is key for getting the most out of your ship in combat. Thermal weapons are great for situations where you need to take down shields and when you have pips to spare to put into weapons. Kinetic weapons are great for situations where your opponents shields are down or where you need to send pips somewhere other than weapons urgently (like diverting power to shields during a head-to-head pass). I tend to prefer gimballed weapons over fixed ones despite the DPS penalty since I feel that I'm able to keep my guns on target longer with them and therefore end up dealing more damage overall, but this is a personal preference. Avoid turreted weapons like the plague, they're terrible in their current state and extremely expensive to boot.