Pirate ship

[Jypson]

NPC piracy is the opposite of very profitable, I have no idea where xondk has been pirating lol, though if you wanted to target NPC's an FDL is probably suitable.

If you want to genuinely pirate you need to consider what class of ship you want to go for, your ship will need to be able to reliably disable / win vs it in combat, it should preferably masslock and it should certainly be faster.

Then just load up with a collector module, a hatchbreaker (if your chasing slow targets) and cargo space and go shoot cargo hatches. Oh and don't forget when dealing with players generally talking will yield you far more profit than just going in guns blazing, compliant traders are where the moneys at (the little that there is).

back to the NPC point, I do recommend practicing on some NPC t9/7/6's though if you want to be sure how to get cargo out.

I'd recommend interdicting, find a system you don't mind possibly getting in trouble with if anything goes wrong or powerplant desides to blow (1% chance of that when it dies I think), npc's will spawn 'from' stations with appropriate export, but they will also spawn near nav beacon with appropriate import to the various stations in the system, so just find one that has a station with high value in or output look for npc's flying towards/away from the stations, take the size of them you think you'll manage best and go for it.

Thanks for the tips. What do you think Clipper or Cutter? Cutter might be a bit overkill maybe? I would like to do something with her though, she's just a hangar queen currently.

 

[777Driver]

Have always wondered why FDEV never created capital class bulk freighters, create convey signals with varying amounts of difficulty. Wings could drop in and attack massive freighters defended by Anaconda's/Corvettes/FDL's etc.. Disable the drives on the bulk freighters before they can jump - Cargo could be beamed across like Seeking weapons/luxury goods signals.

Seems like something that would be easy to implement, challenging and profitable.

 

[sewerratuk]

Thanks for the tips. What do you think Clipper or Cutter? Cutter might be a bit overkill maybe? I would like to do something with her though, she's just a hangar queen currently.

I was interdicted separately twice in a couple of minutes by pirate's in Cutter's. I though I would try to outrun and high wake the second as he was being a bit of an idiot. I lost power in my tradeconda way before the FSD charged :O.

I'm thinking of trying it out, if pirates can afford Cutter's there must be loads of money in it

 

[Derath]

Cutter is fast enough and has a big enough mass lock, but hatching a small ship with that monster?

Lets put it this way it'll certainly work for intimidation / negotiation, it won't work at all for actually forcing cargo if thats what you were going for.

The clippers pretty good at it, its still not great at hatching but its got many things going for it as a pirate ship, best of all its super fast.

 

[Jypson]

Cutter is fast enough and has a big enough mass lock, but hatching a small ship with that monster?

Lets put it this way it'll certainly work for intimidation / negotiation, it won't work at all for actually forcing cargo if thats what you were going for.

The clippers pretty good at it, its still not great at hatching but its got many things going for it as a pirate ship, best of all its super fast.

I don't know if the Cutter will intimidate NPC's, but that would be cool

 

[bootsam]

Plus a cutter could clean you out of cargo completely.

 

[Lateralus]

I'm thinking of stealing things from nice people.
I have an FDL pimped for bounty hunting, if I put a cargo scanner on it, would it make a good pirate ship?

FDL can be used fine for pirating if you can get your hands on a prismatic shield generator. If you can, downgrade the shield to size 4 and put several shield boosters on your utility hard-points. You then have the main internal slot free for 32 capacity cargo space while keeping decent shield strength.

The main advantage of using an FDL for piracy is that you can take traders shields down quickly with the C4 Plasma accelerator - it also has good intimidation factor and loads of utility spaces (for cargo/wake scanners etc).

The main downside though is that you have to sacrifice things like shield cell-banks so you can get more collector limpet controllers etc, so don't hang around too long if bounty-hunter or vigilante wings show up.