How do I purchase a Federal Dropship?
I'd like to purchase a Federal Dropship, but it's telling me that my rank must be Midshipman or higher. How do I achieve this status?
12 Answers
The main strategy is to run missions for Federation-aligned factions.
When you hit 100% at your current rank, a Federal Navy (or other mission with "Navy" or "Naval" in the name) mission will appear. If you don't see it right away, keep running missions; I've done that and when I did the rank mission I was immediately at 10%+ for the next rank.
While combat missions are effective, any missions work.
You can definitely just find a system with a couple federation factions and run missions for them. However, it's not the most effective way to rank up quickly.
One of the ideal scenarios is if you can find two locations that consistently provide data delivery missions to the other location. Then you can stack 20 delivery missions (switching between open/solo/group can help get this done faster) at one location, go to the other location and repeat back and forth.
For combat missions, the best is if you can find stackable combat missions. If there's an isolated system where a Federation faction is at War, use that mode-switching to get 20 conflict zone massacre missions for the same faction, so that each kill counts towards 20 missions. (or as close as you can get to 20) Skimmer kill missions are similarly stackable, as long as they're sending you after the same faction's skimmers or are at the same location. I've also seen stackable bounty-hunting massacre missions.
For all of these, if you're working missions in one area, you'll tend to get more and better mission offers after you've done a few rounds. If you can't get a full set of 20 missions, just take whatever you can get.
Locations for these stackable missions move around. What might be good today (17 Draconis) might not be good tomorrow because the state causing the missions you were using ended.
Note: it's exactly the same for Empire Navy Rank to purchase Empire-specific ships, just replace "Federation" with "Empire" in all of the above.
You need to do combat missions in order to increase your Rank with the Federation Superpower. Once you reach 100% in the rank, you need to do a Federal Navy mission (there's a few different types) in order to actually get your rank to increase. If you don't do the Federal Navy mission, your rank will look like it's stuck at 100% until you do.
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