Awesome / FTL: Faster Than Light

"Thanks to the vailant effort of <ship name>, and her successful crew: <crew names>, the Rebel's flagship was destroyed, throwing their fleet into chaos and ensuring a Federation victory."

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• Beating the game for the first time. Admit it, you cheered.
  • Beating the game, period. Especially if you do it on Normal.
  • For an extra touch, reduce the flagship's crew down to one, then finish off the last crew member and the ship at the same time.
  • You still win if you die as the flagship blows up too.
  • Beating the Flagship without taking a single hit is even more satisfying. You met the Rebels at their strongest... and they weren't even close to defeating you.
• A smaller but similar one can happen if you destroy the under-construction Flagship in the Rebel Stronghold. Its destruction animation is as long as that of the fully-constructed Flagship, you gain massive rewards, the Rebel Fleet gets delayed for two jumps, and if this is your first time destroying it, you unlock the Federation Cruiser!
  • Hell, just the idea of defeating it implies a great victory. Destroying it and the Flagship in the final fight means you not only ensure a Federation victory, but destroy the Rebel's come-back flagship as well.
• When you encounter the plague-infested station, if you have an advanced medbay and the Engi Med-Bot Dispersal augment, you can cure the entire station in less than a minute. Even the game notes that the colony leaders are astonished.
• Having the appropriate weapons for the Giant Spiders: Gliding up to the airlock and letting an anti-personnel drone to quickly kill the creatures, or the more awesome (if less rewarded) option of slamming a boarding drone through the station's hull before it starts tearing the spiders apart, or the surgical option of using a bio-beam to pick them off one by one.
  • Sending your crew in is risky, as there's a non-trivial chance you'll lose one of them, but if they come out all alive, you'll get as much reward as if you used the Anti-Bio Beam, while your crew gets to look badass for taking on a bunch of killer arachnids by themselves.
• The Weapon Pre-Igniter plus a crazy-powerful weapon like the Glaive Beam.
  • If you're very, very lucky, you can get the Weapon Pre-Igniter as a post-battle reward, a surrender offer, or best of all, a random "found an item" event. This can happen in sector one. If that happens, have fun breaking the game.
    • For example, you can use the Pre-Igniter to defeat an enemy ship without letting it fire, or if the enemy is weak enough and your weapons are powerful enough, you can destroy it in a single Alpha Strike.
    • The first time you do the former situation will actually give you an achievement called "They never saw it coming".
  • Masterful use in the DA SR-12 results in this, if you find a Pre-Ignitor alongside a Flak II (if you have Advanced Edition turned on of course). Even the mighty Rebel Flagship itself stands little chance aside from the occasional lucky shot in-between cloak cooldowns.
• Sending more than one Boarding Drone is also hilarious: punching holes in the enemy hull and watching your killer robots rampage through the enemy ship is awesome.
• Similar hilarity comes from using two Ion Blast II's and literally paralyzing enemy ships, leaving them unable to raise shields or fire weapons as you tear them apart with drones. Especially if you have an upgraded weapon crew member — which you will very quickly.
• Automated Loader + lots of burst lasers + upgraded weapon crew member = fun for the whole family. Also note that the reloader can stack and is quite cheap.
  • Even better: Throw in a Chain Vulcan for maximum dakka.
• You may encounter a Mantis Cruiser lined with Rock body parts. If you're flying any of the three Rock Cruisers or have the Rock Plating augment, you get an option called "Ram the bastards." Doing this will disable the Mantis ship's engines permanently (while the Rock Plating ensures your ship is unharmed), allowing you to get guaranteed hits, in a very rare opportunity to preemptively disable an enemy's systems instead of the other way around.
• Buying (or lucking into) two Mk II attack drones. One player reportedly destroyed the flagship in under three minutes.
• Outwitting the Slugs, whether it be by using your own Slug's psychic powers to sense their attempts to plunder your ship, letting a Rock crewmember No-Sell a spiked drink, getting a Mantis to slice them in half after they try to lure you off your ship, or just by forcing them to surrender after kicking the crap out of their ship.
• A big one for the developers; after delivering an absolutely fantastic product, they went on to tweak and improve it, fixed a bunch major bugs on the way, and slapped on some serious content additions, effectively creating what other companies would sell as sequel, or at least a major expansion pack. What does Subset Games do? Release it for free.
• If you can send 4 Mantis onto an opposing ship using a Teleporter, they'll kill the entire crew, assuming there is any. Medbay? No problem, they'll kill the fleeing crewman before it can even leave the room. Clone Bay? Even less of an issue. And they can do all that without any fancy Crystal Lockdown power or even a simple hacking module latched onto the Medbay. Watching your Mantis systematically murder the entire crew of the Rebel Flagship like this is truly a sight to behold.
• In a similar vein, sending a Lanius boarding party to destroy the oxygen unit, and then sitting back and having a laugh while your Lanius crew keep the oxygen room depressurized, leaving the vacuum-averse enemy crew to die because they won't go into the room they really need to get into.