So I want to unlock more ships or even just the Layout B of the starter ship, which I read was a pretty awesome layout. You have to complete 2 of 3 achievements to unlock it. These are the achievements:
1.) Have 6 different aliens as crew members. Since you start off with 3 humans, you need to pick up 5 new crew, all different. This is SUPER luck based.
2.) Get your ship down to one health point, then fully repair it. This also seems really hard to do.
3.) Fully outfit your ship. That means you have to buy the Cloak, the Teleporter, and the Drone Control. This is doable if you save your scrap and hit a store selling them all, which seems to be fairly frequent.
i decided my next couple runs I would dedicate to these tasks. Don't spend scrap on ANYTHING. Save save save, then attempt to do the last two. So thats what I do...save save save.
To do number 2 I was going to get in a fight, take down my shields until the damage was done, then warp away. I got lucky though and found a minefield right next to a store node. Blew up the bad guy there and just let the asteroids hit me. The asteroids are pretty regular and only do 1 damage so it was simple to keep an eye on. Hard part is making sure I could jump away when I needed to. The asteroids were causing all sorts of fire and damaged systems across my ship and if it took out my engines or control rooms then I would be toast. Luckily that didn't happen so a quick warp and ~50 scrap later = achievement unlocked.
I had not picked up any crew so far so #1 was out. But sure, why not try for #3 while I'm at it? I had scrap and this store was selling the upgrades, so I bought 2 of them. One more and I'd have it! Even selling my weapons wouldn't have given me enough. I was about 30 shy even if I sold my weapons to do it. Damn. Well, maybe I can collect it in the surrounding nodes and come back. Good plan and I did collect it, but by the time I did the Rebels had caught up and I couldn't go back to that store. I had to move forward and hope I'd come across another one selling that.
Eventually I did hit on that other store so I bought the thing! BAM! Achievement unlocked! New Ship Layout Unlocked! HAPPY! But...my poor crew. These little badasses were awesome, but I had to sell a weapon to pay for the upgrade. I still had my missiles, but not too many in stock. I could have given up on them but no, we would fight to the end. Luckily a lot of the nodes I hit has people bribing me to leave them alone, or just nothing of interest in them. I was starting to run out of fuel. I used my last fuel to jump into a store to see what they had. With all the scrap i had left I figured I maybe could hire on all that crew. No luck. I decided I wanted to see what running out of fuel did. I bought one last fuel and jumped...
Into an asteroid field. We were not going to drift endlessly. Fires everywhere, damage everywhere, no air....it wasn't pretty.
So yeah, crazy ride. I never expected I would be able to do both achievements in a single run. Got me the Red-Tail layout to try. More weapons! More crew! More chaos!