Strangely, I was within 0.75-0.85 of Normandie's guns, and they never hit me once.
This is actually a wrong statement, you might have been in that range for your guns in relation to the Normandie herself, but not in relation to her guns.
This is due to the size of motherships leading to not all guns being able to defend all parts of the ship and due to mindarks design flaw of not making one of the hangar gunner turrets avaiable to use yet it even leaves you one point to attack where no gun can hit you back. This has been figured out by stagger some time back and he has been experimenting with it for awhile now leading to this 'Special' attack from 'outofrange' for mothership guns.
So yes congratulations on being the first to take down Normandie on a passenger flight, though no passengers were lootet and only a few peds worth of pirate gift stuff from the crew.
I already put a support case of reassigning the current gunner turret access for one gun to allow covering the whole mothership towards mindark quite some time ago and maybe they will listen more closely to this now as you are showing off how to attack out of safety.
You still took quite some time to bring the ship down and if the guns coud have been used to retaliate fire on more then the few occassions were one of you didnt watch his distance you can be sure you would have been all dead.
But regardless this kind of attacks have been the reason for me to start aquisition of another mothership to cover the weakspot which will soon make sure that you have to fight in guns range regardless of wheter mindark fixes that bug or not.
And to the person saying to do this after i sayed that pirates are no thread - i still stand by what i said:
'In my opinion there is no thread from real pirates, but what we happen to have in the universe is a few pirate organisations who try to establish
some kind of taxation for spacecrafts providing passenger service.
This of course is a development that needs to be cut down as long as its weak and the major reason why i have went the route of raising an additional
crew for a new battleship that soon will join the ToS starfleet.'
Trying to establish a taxation and attacking ships knowing that the costs to kill them are way higher then anything you could loot from them is no act of piracy - its an act of 'bountyhunting' performed by the funding of Caly and Stagger paying big for all your guys ammo. Though there is nothing wrong with that it just shows how right i was in preparing to extend the ToS starfleet.