The idea here is that you shouldn't be trying to take them out for good. Shooting disabled ships will not make other companies happy with you, and AI ships won't do it either.

What you might want to do instead is guard these ships. If your enemy wants them back in fighting shape, he'll have to either take the sector back, make peace with you, or wait for you to leave. If you need to leave, the cost of repairs will still be significant, so your victory is still effective !

If you still want rid of these ships, there is yet another way - push them out of the sector, physically. This might be damaging to your own ships, but can be used as a last resort if you know a powerful and lightly damaged ship will be back in action quickly.

That's fine and all, and that's how I was pleased enough to play it; I hadn't gotten into the combat at all really. But soon after the pirates attacked me,
there was a very lucrative contract offered to DESTROY pirate ships,
and I'm fighting 'em anyway so why not get some extra money for it, eh? So I took it. I lose some huge amount of reputation if I fail. Disabling them, guarding them, and even buying "Pirate Tech" and capturing them have not moved the pointer on meeting this contractual obligation.

If you don't want me doing it, why are you offering contracts for it? Just a sort of "buyer beware" sucker thing?

I have to admit that such contracts aren't our best game design.

The general design idea in Helium Rain is to provide choices, meaningful layers of gameplay, and balancing. The mechanic of disabling vehicles plays with that - using weapons overpowered for the target will often destroy vehicles entirely, but balanced engagements will result in many disabled ships that can be retrieved. This is as much a strategic element for you to use as it is a guarantee that your own fleet won't get wiped out entirely. The contract here is provides in itself a choice - you don't *have* to take it, and if you aren't going to engage small ships with multiple Hammer guns, you probably shouldn't. But most games offer contracts that you always can fullfil, and this might not be the case here, which is a design fault on our part.

Now that you did take the contract, you can fullfil it by engaging disabled ships yourself (this will however lead to a diplomatic penalty) or find new undamaged ships to engage with heavy-hitting guns. I'm sorry that this is a bit of a catch-22.

OK. I'll think which way I want to approach that.

Maybe you should make the attack contracts, or most of them, pay a bit less but only require disabling enemy ships. The actual "destroy" contracts could then be a contrasting higher-pay, higher-risk thing that was a bit rare.