How PvP piracy works in Elite.
It doesn't.
So here is what you can do.
Option 1:
1. Fly around in Supercruise and find a random Hauler or Type6
2. Interdict the player
3. Immediately attack and take out shields
4. With shields down, target drives and disable them
5. While they are floating around start shooting limpets at them until they are empty or you are full
6. Go sell cargo or find another target
Consequence: You get bounty for assault, which is around 200-600Cr. The victim is floating around with no drives and has to self destruct to respawn, but at least you avoided the 6000Cr bounty.
Option 2:
1. Camp stations and cargo scan as they leave
2. Pick whoever has nice loot and follow them using FSD Wake Scanner
3. Repeat step 2 thru 6 from Option 1.
Consequence: Same as option 1, except you might avoid the assault bounty if you are in an anarchy system when you interdict. Not that the 200-600Cr bounty matters. One ton of cargo sold covers that expense.
"Oh!", you exclaim!
"But we should threaten them and force them to drop cargo", you suggest.
Sure, you go ahead and try that. 10 out of 10 times they will rather die than drop any cargo. I have no idea why, but I strongly suspect it's some old EVE Online mentality where you never gave anything to pirates ever since they would almost always destroy your ship anyways for the killmail. Plus... another very important factor from EVE, which is not featured in Elite, is that killing a ship still lets you loot items from the wreck. In Elite, killing a ship will destroy ALL items installed or carried by the ship.
But still... players rather die than give up cargo.
Furthermore I think you should be aware of the following:
1) Destroying the FSD will cause the ship to explode. Not sure why, but I have tested this and once the FSD module is reaches 0% the ship explodes.
2) Disabling Drives leaves the player permanently unable to activate frameshift or even maneuver their ships. Only thing they can do is self-destruct to respawn. So disabling drives then demand cargo to let them live is pointless... they are dead either way once the drives are disabled.
They seriously need to improve on pirating. Heavy consequences for murder and being unable to dock at stations in high population areas would be good starting points, but that also requires us to actually be able to do pirating without killing players and driving them off open play. To make that happen they need to add distress signal for getting repairs for disabled drives or FSD modules so victims can actually survive... and they need to make the cargo hatch breakers more effective as well as the cargo hatch easier to hit.
In current state however, being a pirate is a tedious and frustrating thing... for both the pirate and the victim.
