Cruise Disruptors
A straightforward guide to Cruise Disruptors. See the summary points.

Being Disrupted
So you're cruising along, you hear a missile warning, then you get hit and drop out of cruise. Notice your cruise engines won't work for about five seconds. Cruise Disruptors travel REALLY fast, and although they can be avoided by using countermeasures, it's a gamble.

Evading Disruptors
Computer opponents will only use cruise disruptors if you are cruising, so killing the engines during cruise will prevent any such attack. The downside is you will slowly reduce speed as you drift along. Note that enemies usually use disruptors when closer than 2000m.

Johann: "When you are disrupted, the the slow recovery time will probably mean you are damaged or dead by the time you get going. Use engine kill, drift and mines to get some distance from your attackers before starting up your engines again."

Problems with Cruise Disruptors
Note that if you don't kill your engines in time, a hit from a Cruise Disruptor will RESTART your engines and slow you to 79m/s even if you are drifting with the engines off. This doesn't make sense in the game logic, but it turns out to be very handy indeed for Player-Vs-Player.

Also, if your engines are off when you are hit by a disruptor, the disruption countdown will not start until you turn the engines back on. This is also a game error, we think.

Using Cruise Disruptors
They move so fast and hit so often that you wish they'd do more damage! Using Cruise Disruptor can be fun and downright useful, as you can slow an escaping enemy in a mission and watch the escort keep on cruising, leaving their buddy behind. That's also a game error.

Summary Points
Cruise Disruptors disable your cruise engines for a few seconds.

Disruptors are very fast and hard to avoid, they almost always hit the target.

Exploit the Cruise Disruptor bugs and hit a drifting enemy to restart their engines.