Angels Fall First Capital Ships Guide: Helms, Crews and Boarding Actions

Capital ships are Angels Fall First’s signature toy: player-piloted warships with player-crewed guns, walkable interiors, repairable subsystems, and the ever-present threat of enemy marines storming through a breached airlock. This guide covers the ten hulls, how to captain and crew them, and both sides of a boarding action.

Capital ship fundamentals

Getting one: ships are offered by score like ground vehicles — F1 claims a newly spawned hull when prompted. What’s available depends on the map (see the map database for each map’s roster).

Flight model: same as fighters — gravity mode on/off (grav-off lets a capital coast at boost speed to the front), Z fires the shield, a timed damage absorb whose cooldown defines capital duels. Time yours against their alpha; time your alpha against their shield’s downtime. That rhythm is capital combat.

Spawn logistics: frigates and battleships spawn the whole team; smaller hulls spawn only the captain’s squad. A frigate parked safely forward is worth more than its guns — it’s your team’s forward operating base. Lose the big ships and your team may literally have nowhere to deploy.

Interiors are real. Crew walk the decks, man gun positions, and repair subsystem consoles with the Multitool. Repairing an active ship is among the fastest Support XP in the game. There is currently no escaping a dying corvette/destroyer/cruiser; frigates and battleships let you sprint for the fighter bay.

Subsystems can be targeted (fighters press N): primary weapons, point defence, engines. A de-fanged ship is a mission kill even if the hull survives — and it’s your cue as crew to be standing at those consoles, wrench out.

The ULA fleet

Class	Ship	Character
Corvette	Griphon	Jack-of-all-trades escort, light armour. Ion cannon at the helm.
Destroyer	Rejkhart	Captain fires 3-torpedo salvos; a gunner mans the ion cannon. Anti-capital monster when fully crewed.
Cruiser	Heimdall	Guided-missile cruiser; twin ion cannons. Fights long.
Frigate	Ranger	Fighter bay, 4 medium plasma + 2 railguns. The stronger frigate.
Battleship	Huginn	Massive bow ion beam, 4 railguns, 3 vulcans. Often the mission objective itself.

The Rejkhart deserves its reputation: torpedo salvos from the helm while a human gunner works the ion cannon out-damages nearly anything its size — but it needs that gunner. An uncrewed Rejkhart is half a ship.

The AIA fleet

Class	Ship	Character
Corvette	Ti	Dense light battery; superb anti-fighter escort, no beam for capital duels.
Destroyer	Javert	Heavy slugger — ion cannon + heavy plasma. Weak versus agile bombers.
Cruiser	Chons	Several ion cannons, all facing forward. Nearly blind astern.
Frigate	Khamun	Fighter bay, short/medium battery. Fights close, loses to Ranger at range.
Battleship	Anubis	Five heavy plasma on the wings. Deletes capitals, struggles with fast movers.

The AIA doctrine writes itself: plasma hits colossally but flies slow, so AIA capitals want to close range against ships and lean on Ti escorts and fighters against bombers. The Chons’ forward-only armament makes “never show your stern” a literal survival rule.

Captaining well

1. Crew before glory. A battleship with human gunners and a repair team is worth three empty ones. Ask your squad aboard — or as squad leader, order bots in; they man guns.
2. Fight the shield rhythm. Guns land during their shield downtime; your shield eats their heaviest volley. Firing your shield reflexively at chip damage is how battleships die.
3. Use terrain. Stations, asteroids and ice hide even battleships from bomber ambushes (Lellebah’s station openings famously swallow whole capitals).
4. Mind the arcs. Every hull has blind spots — the Chons astern, the Anubis against crossing fighters. Position so escorts cover what you can’t.
5. You are the spawn point. Retreating a burning frigate out of a lost fight preserves your team’s deployment options. Heroic last stands cost more than the hull.

Boarding: the attacker’s playbook

Frigates and battleships can be boarded by dropships (ULA Dragoon / AIA Cricket). The run:

1. Tag the target with G — a door icon marks the breach point on the hull.
2. Fly the approach along blind arcs, gunners manned, and slow down at the hull until the yellow ring appears — then F to dock.
3. Accept the redeploy prompt and run to the back of the dropship before the boarding pod launches — miss it and you’re locked out, reduced to respawning into the pod later via the tac map.
4. The breach point becomes your team’s spawn on the enemy ship.

Inside, signage points to objectives. The fast win: destroy the engine lockout consoles scattered through the ship, which drop the force field on the engine core astern — kill the core and the ship dies. Everything (lockouts, weapon consoles, the core) takes any damage, knife included. You get ~30 seconds to steal a hangar fighter and escape the explosion, or just respawn.

Slower but crueller: wreck weapon consoles for a mission kill, or steal fighters and bombers straight out of their hangar.

Boarding: the defender’s playbook

There is no boarding alarm. Watch the tac map for attack objectives blooming on your own hull’s outline — that’s the tell. Then:

• Shoot the breach point. Gunfire or charges on the pod entrance destroys the boarders’ spawn, and the remaining marines starve.
• Breach secured behind autosentries and mines? Launch a fighter and find the pod on the hull exterior — usually port or starboard near the bow, almost never dorsal/ventral — and shoot it off the ship, bypassing the interior defence entirely.
• Assign a standing repair watch: the same crew that Multitools subsystems between volleys is your damage-control party during boardings, reviving defenders and re-hardening consoles.

A crewed ship repels most boardings; an empty one is a free kill walking. If you take one lesson from this page: capital ships are squads with a hull around them, not solo mounts.

Related guides

• Space combat & fighter guide
• Squad leader guide
• Ship database