SCA is a faction with no home sector, no shipyards, and generally only stations producing illegal goods. SCA stations are common in unclaimed sectors.

SCA also owns ships which travel the gate network attacking traders and stealing cargo.

Reputation

Your reputation with SCA is locked at -5, no matter what you do (until you complete a difficult and advanced special project with them, which you won’t even hear about until far into the game).

This means that you can (and should) attack SCA ships with abandon, and steal or destroy them. Boarding SCA destroyers and capturing their corvettes is a very popular way to get “free” ships when getting started.

Because SCA reputation is locked, it means that (a) you can’t become friends with them to get them to stop pirating you, and (b) you can’t make things worse by attacking them.

SCA Piracy

The game will spawn SCA ships randomly. SCA doesn’t run shipyards, and don’t have to build their own ships. They just appear, and this can be in any sector (though they’re almost never found in Split and Terran sectors).

SCA ships are pirates. They use false transponder codes to look like they’re part of another faction, and may drop their cover ID and make demands that your traders drop cargo. If you refuse to comply, the ship will turn hostile and attack your trader. The freighter may escape, may get saved by local military ships, or may get destroyed.

See also: Piracy

It’s generally a good idea to kill or capture SCA ships to cut down on piracy when they appear in sectors where your traders are operating.

Notes on attacking SCA ships:

• if you attack while their false identity is active, you will likely lose reputation with whatever faction they are masquerading as
• you can expose and drop their false ID by using your ship’s Scan Mode to scan them
• after making threats (successful or not), SCA ships will quickly resume a new cover ID and try to rapidly move away from the area
• SCA ships, even with false ID’s, are always named “pillager”, “plunderer” or “raider”, allowing you to recognize (or search for) them even while hiding under a “cover” ID

Finding SCA ships

If an SCA ship reveals itself, you can order any of your ships to “follow” it and they will do so forever, until you cancel the order, even into places where you have no satelite coverage; this allows you to “track” ships until you can get there with a fighter to attack them.

The easiest passive way to find SCA ships is to get good satellite coverage, then use the map filter.

You can type in “raider“, “pillager” or “plunderer” and then choose the map view option to view all objects (top icon on left of map screen). Zoom out, and the map will show and list all ships with the search word in their name.

Note the position of ships of interest, and remove the search item to restore map to normal.