If you are looking for free ships by making pilots bail, anything that involves pilots ejecting themselves into space, go search for “the absolute most painless guide to bailing”.

This guide does NOT work with X3:TC because RRF doesn’t exist there.

In one sentence:
put marines onto a capital ship, they fight their way in to give you the control.

1st key word: marines.

I think you have noticed places that sell them. Buy them, put them into a ship, dock at a military outpost. You can then train up their skills. If you can’t see their skills equip bioscanner.

That’s what reasonable human beings would do, and it also takes tons of time and money. Instead in this guide we’ll abduct good marines from other ships in the next section. Bear with me.

2nd key word(s): onto a capital ship

“A capital ship” means a TM(military transport), M6 or bigger. You need 6 marines for TM/M6, 20 for anything bigger.

“Onto” is the tricky part and probably why you are reading this.
You can either spacewalk or fire boarding pods.

Spacewalk
Spacewalk is putting marines in space and they fly over to your target. If it sounds ridiculously dangerous and hard to pull off, that’s exactly how it is. The marine skill “mechanical” decides if they are able to cut open the hull. I usually do spacewalk exactly once per playthrough to get my first M7M, because I’m an absolute piece of casual and am averse to anything challenging that takes me out of my comfort zone.

Boarding pods
You put your marines into missiles and fire them at your target. 5 marines = 1 pod. Only M7Ms (missile frigates) and the M6 Acinonyx Prototype (quest reward) can fire boarding pods. Hence why we want an M7M at our disposal. Boarding pods lower the marine skill “mechanical” requirement to penetrate the target hull. Mid 50ish mechanical + boarding pod = guaranteed success.

Anyway, while marines are making contact with your target, you need to keep its shield down so your marines don’t get fried. For M1/M2, that threshold is 5%. For anything smaller it’s 10%. After the marines make it into the ships the shield % doesn’t matter any more.

3rd key word(s): they fight their way in to give you the control.

The marine skill “fighting” can’t be trained (increases with boarding experience) and it matters now. Higher fighting (collectively as a group) = less likely to die.
At the end the marines would need to hack the ship computer for access. The marine skill “hacking” matters now. Only a few of your best hackers matter so I usually have 5 out of 20 marines be hacking specialists.
The last marine skill “engineering” decides how much they would damage the hull in their fighting.

First I’m about to pull a pro gamer move and just abduct good marines.

In AP there are these ships called Rapid Response Something. If you see a Rapid Response M7M, fly up and scan its cargo.

Now what do we see, boarding pods, good marines, hmmm I wonder?

This section in one sentence: bait the RR M7M to shoot boarding pods at you, intercept the pods, and collect their marines.

Preparations:
Prepare an M6 with:
Cargo lifesupport system, freight scanner, bioscanner, jump drive, 100ish mosquitos, good weapons that can shoot down hammer torpedoes.
Get your first M6 from quest reward, abandoned ship mission, or buy it like a filthy casual.

Prepare a fast TP with jumpdrive. Our M6 only holds 10 marines, and the RRF M7M is going to give us 16 good marines if we pull this off. I recommend Iguana Vanguard or Ocelot.

Approach the M7M, scan it. Check how many hammer torpedoes left, check if all 20 marines are intact. Keep track of the ship on your upper right corner. Save the game.

From about 5km away, aggro the ship by firing 3-5 mosquitos at it every 10 seconds or so.
Once aggroed it would start firing hammer torpedoes at you. Don’t trust your automatic missile defense, shoot down the missiles with weapons.

WARNING: do not save while hammer torpedoes are in the air. For some reason they become much harder to blow up after a reload.

Once it runs out of torpedoes it’s a great time to save the game. Your M6 shouldn’t care about flails anyway.
Once it runs out of flails too it would attempt to cheat by jumping straight to a shipyard to refuel.

That’s right, RRF ships cheat like crazy. If you see its speed suddenly drop to 0m/s and then back up, it has already initiated the jump.
Since you have it watched on your upper right corner, you know where it has gone to.
Reload the game and beat it to that sector.

If you are O(ut)O(f)S(ector) when the RRF ship jumps, it shows up already in the shipyard and all your efforts are wasted.
If you beat it to the sector, however, it shows up near the shipyard and attempt to crawl there. We are not allowing it, are we? It’s a good time to call in another ship for marine storage.

From about 3km away from the M7M, eject your shields, and poke it with mosquitos like before. Only this time, it would attempt to fire its own mosquitos and boarding pods at you.

If you are curious what happens when your own ship gets boarded, let the pods hit you.

You need to manually target the boarding pods and launch mosquitos at them. Missile defense system doesn’t react to boarding pods.
4 out of the 5 marines from a pod should survive and now are floating in space. Collect them. Remember your M6 only holds 10 marines.
Don’t intercept the pods at launch otherwise all the marines get reabsorbed back into the M7M. Intercept them mid way so the marines can’t go back.

If everything goes smoothly, you should now have 16 elite marines ready to go! Do this again for another 16 if you want, for a full 20-marine operation on an M7 or above.

It’s time to grab an M7M so we have something to fire boarding pods. These ships can also just show up for free in abandoned ship missions at very high rep rank, I think rank 9-10 but don’t quote me.

Preparations:
Your M6 with good shield damage weapons.
Your TP with fight command software mk1, mk2, teleporter device and 20 marines.

Step 1: locate your target

Fly through space and look for a lone regular M7M, NOT another RRF. RRF ships are much harder to board. Boarding an M7M would drop your rep A LOT. If you want to stay at positive, I would not do this until you are at least rank 8-10 with the faction.

Scan the ship to see if it has anything nasty. If it has missiles, exhaust them. If you see “hull polarizing device” in equipment you would need to fry it off.
"Frying off" ship equipment means damaging the ship after shield down would have a chance to break equipment.

Step 2: attack

Call in your M6 and TP. Fly your M6 and have the TP follow you.
Attack the M7M until its shield is depleted or until hull polarizing device is gone.
Save the game.

Step 3: spacewalk

Hop back into your TP and order your M6 to “attack shield of…” the M7M.

Here comes the key part. You need to stay in front of the M7M when you release the marines. If it is flying away from you, your marines will never catch up.
You can press F2 to switch to external view of your ship, for a better grasp of positioning.
You need to personally fly your TP to a spot about 500m in front of the M7M, save the game, then go command -> combat -> piracy -> board ship.

I’m using screenshots from X3:FL. If you don’t see this command exactly here, dig around the console I’m 100% sure something similar exists in AP.
I think there’s also a hotkey called launch all marines somewhere in the settings. Either works.

Your TP should initiate autopilot and then immediately release all marines on its own.

Step 4: profit

Double check that all 20 marines are heading towards the M7M by checking sector map, your TP’s cargo, or in property -> personnel tab.
Now you can hop back into the m6 for finer control of weapon fire. In the meantime tell your TP to jump away to safety.
The marines should make contact shortly and get you the M7M.

Now that we have an M7M, I was gonna say sky's the limit, but we are already in space, aren’t we?

I use my M7M to fire boarding pods and nothing else, because controlling enemy shield with missles is just really too much pain. Read my title again.
Which means, we need another ship that can reliably strip down the shields of M1/M2/M7 while staying comfortably in rear turret fire for a few minutes.

I use an overtuned Agamemnon for this but any M7 with capital grade weapons can do. M6 is too sweaty and M2 too slow.

I trust you have the basics down already so let’s move quickly.

Step 1: kite your target towards somewhere your M7M can jump in.

Step 2: call your M7M in and let it stay about 10km away from your target.

Step 3: keep the shield down and remotely order your M7M to board the ship. It should immediately fire 4 boarding pods at your target as long as the shield is under the threshold. The “launch all marines” hotkey only works when you are personally flying the M7M.

Step ?: profit.

Terran & Xenon capitals larger than M6 cannot be spacewalk’d. Your marines simply cannot breach the hull.

If you see Advanced Firewall or Hull Polarizing Device on Terran & Xenon capitals you need to fry them off.

Xenon M7 or above always kills at least one marine on deck 1. You need to start with 21 marines and keep sending reinforcements. If you are feeling lucky, start with 21 marines, send 1 very well-timed reinforcement by themselves shortly to join in on deck 2. Then reload until deck 2-5 doesn't kill your marines at all. ONE casualty is near unavoidable.

RRF ships come with a full deck of marines of their own. Fry off the cargo lifesupport system to kill them all.

If you jump out as soon as your marines breach hull, no damage will be done to the ship regardless of your marines’ engineering skill. I call this OOS boarding.

If boarding M7 or smaller, you can fly in your M7M, set target race to enemy, bump your target carefully until shield is almost down, fine control with a few flails, and launch marines with hotkey at point blank.

You can couple this with OOS boarding by initiating jump as soon as the pods are launched, keep shield down with flails, and enjoy the benefits of OOS boarding while spending minimum amounts of missiles and reputation.