Newcomer / Intro How bad regular pirate missions be?

[M0rdresh]

Jeez, regular 'go kill pirates' are atrocious, jumping in and out unidentified time wastes with either canister and on the very odd chance a wanted.
Been flying for a full hour in the only system the mission gave (no nav beacon), managed two find two of the four required pirates.

It's a lousy 13k mission for crying out load.
There's some serious work required to make these interesting.

 

[Johnny Cyclops]

Had similar on my Fed Rep Mission builder for the next Naval rank. Four USS (slowly!), with two minor wanteds that didn't want to shoot me first, so in the end I opened up, but then ED won't treat them as pirates, and I get a kill on a Hauler and Sidey, and a few thousand in bounty.

 

[Goilveig]

It can be good or bad. Does the system have any asteroid belts or planets with rings? Those are great sources of pirates. Otherwise you're stuck with USS, and the frequency of USS depends on system population. You can also try to fly around supercruise with cargo and hope to be interdicted. I recommend scoping out the system in advance.

 

[SpydersByte]

Yea I'm gonna have to agree that they don't show up nearly often enough, and USS's are just a pain. I think it's more about the time it takes to exit supercruise. It seems to me like half of my USS investigation time is spent at 75% throttle approaching the things. If they could give us a faster way out of supercruise (but without losing the USS like an emergency drop) it wouldn't be nearly as bad.

 

[M0rdresh]

I think I found the culprit, when disengaging into an unidentified signal I always just kill those with a bounty.
However it appears I can kill also those that talk 'what cargo do you have'. They didn't have a bounty, but I have killed them without a fine and they counted as mission kills...

 

[Universal Evil]

I think I found the culprit, when disengaging into an unidentified signal I always just kill those with a bounty.
However it appears I can kill also those that talk 'what cargo do you have'. They didn't have a bounty, but I have killed them without a fine and they counted as mission kills...

If you don't have a KWS(killWarrantScanner) on your ship you don't always see the NPC pirates as "Wanted" but they can still count as pirats kills on your missionlist...

 

[the100thmonkey]

A kill warrant scanner is really useful for these missions (if you don't have one installed already) as it gives you bounties on ships killed in anarchy systems.

Additionally, when you do your basic scan of a ship, check the faction it flies under in the contacts tab - If it's something like "The Purple Posse", it's a pirate.

Additionally, the USSes spawn regardless of location in the system. This means that you can fly at zero throttle (30km/s) and wait for the USS to come to you. As you're at minimum speed, there's no deceleration - the USS spawn within 1,000km.

 

[adoredtv]

Jeez, regular 'go kill pirates' are atrocious, jumping in and out unidentified time wastes with either canister and on the very odd chance a wanted.
Been flying for a full hour in the only system the mission gave (no nav beacon), managed two find two of the four required pirates.

It's a lousy 13k mission for crying out load.
There's some serious work required to make these interesting.

USS's are completely whacked now. They probably should never have existed tbh.