Living the life of a pirate.. how doable is it?

danskmacabre

danskmacabre
Having the Mercenary edition, I haven't actually played ED yet, but looking forward to the 16th of Dec to have a go.

I'm quite keen on living a life of piracy, plying the trade lanes, robbing innocent traders and generally living life on the edge of society.

How doable is this in ED atm?
Will I have to play it straight for a while to build up a decent ship?

If I'm wanted, as I expect I will be pretty quickly, how can I dock at stations?
Are there stations for those more on the darker side of the law out there?
 

Mr_Jim

M
Its pretty rough actually. At least in the gamma you can shoot the cargo hatch and your target will most probably drop loot. Easiest is the Hauler (often wanted as well) and the Lakon-6. The Lakon-9 bites more often, a bit tricky in the beginning.
 

King Hrothgar

K
In gamma I've made nearly all my money pirating and bounty hunting. I use the bounties to cover the fines (they are all opportunistic anyways, no hunting is involved) while the loot is the big payout. The last time I paid my bounty may be the last though. The only reservation I have is I think you're required to pay off all fines and bounties on you when your ship dies even if you spawn in a system hostile to those you've been attacking. At least that's my understanding of it. Hopefully that isn't the case but will need to test it.

In any case, I'm advancing along fairly nicely doing this. I've also made a bit off of abandoned goodies in USS's. It is worth noting that my dinky eagle has only had 4 units of cargo the entire time due to an inability to find 4 ton cargo racks. At the very end of my last session, I gave up on finding that stuff where I was and simply headed to Aulin where I know they had them in beta 3. So that is finally sorted out along with some other much needed upgrades. On a related note, don't go to Sol for upgrades, they sell practically nothing in the half dozen stations there. You'd think it would be the trade hub of all humans, but it sells precious little in regards to ships and equipment for them.
 

aRtFuL

A
The trickiest part of piracy is not the pirating part itself but identifying where to sell the illegal cargo and not get fined - because the fines for holding illegal cargo is huge.

If you failed to escape authority scan and got scanned you might as well jettison the cargo before the finish scan to avoid the larger fines.

You need to note down which outpost is good for selling illegal goods and if you are not in range of such an outpost, got to learn to dock at bigger stations very quickly to evade cargo scans.
 

Razorback

Razorback
System: LFT 1664

There's a little mining outpost, the name escapes me at the moment. But there's no patrols there and a black market to sell stuff at.
 

Crystles

Crystles
I made my first half mill doing just piracy. Its definitely possible!

Piracy is complemented very well by bounty hunting. If you go to an anarchy system, most targets there have an extra cash grab on their head so you dont have to worry about a total loss for popping them if you didnt get the cargo hatch all the way down.

Also, forget the limpets... Frackin useless. Dropped 10 on a single guy, not one of them worked... Shooting their hatch off however can net you the majority, even all of their cargo with out having to 100% break it.

I recommend a warrant scanner and a cargo scanner. Fire them off at the same time.

I recommend using all laser weaponry. Remember, your not in it for the kill, you want precision. 2 gimbaled pulse for the size 1's and 2 size 2 beams.

On a cobra, the class 1's are too far apart to use fixed weapons with any kind of reliability (as I found out the hard way...) so make 100% sure those are gimbaled, whatever you use them for.
 
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