Lets start from what we already have...

1. Capture the cargo

In light of new ship costs ctc is quite pointless. You can only lose money on it.
How about you make a mission out of it where pilots get actually payed for doing it and handsomely rewarded if they do good.

Rewards:

 time spent on a mission: 50000 cr per hour

 ctc transport kill: 20000 cr

 ctc kill assist: 10000 cr

 ctc escort kill: 10000 cr

 ctc cargo delivered: 1 cu @ 10000 cr

 enemy pilot killed while on ctc mission: 50000 cr

2. Border Patrol

Similar solution to ctc albeit you only get payed for time spent in BP sector not for sitting in a station with mission active.

Rewards:

 time spent on a mission: 50000 cr per hour

 BP bot kill: 10000 cr

 BP enemy player kill: 50000 cr

 upon completion of mission you get rewarded with a free nation specific ship

3. Border Skirmish

It sucks in so many things anyway so I wont bother with it.

And now something we do not have...

1. Search and destroy mission

Nation combat pilots can take a mission to search and destroy enemy pilots.
Who is considered enemy pilot:
a) warring faction players (Itani/Serco) regardless of faction standing
b) pirates, traitors (negative faction standing) or enemy collaborators
c) UIT/SERCO/ITANI players with all POS (for ruining the game)

Rewards:

 enemy pilot kill: 50000 cr

Edit:

I DO NOT WANT TO GET KOS WITH MY NATION FOR KILLING A KNOWN PIRATE OR ENEMY FACTION PLAYER WITH POS STANDING IN MY NATION SPACE!!!!
This is just ridiculous and unnatural exploiting of moronic faction system we have now.
Get rid of FACTION PROTECTION for non-faction pilots NOW!

With the exception of being paid by the hour, I like it. But as it stands now I could just grab a hive mission and idle for hours, getting paid 50k/hour.

Perhaps do it in reverse, bigger payout for faster mission completion?

On the hive missions, payout should vary much much more for kills on larger bots. Make kills vs ships like Helmans worth many many times more than kills on a collector. The payout for kills should also be divided among all those who did damge much like the exp.

Similar payout for Border Skirmish, the different ship types should yeild different amounts of exp and credits for kills / partial kills especially capital ships.

Jeeze Bojan, they're getting rid of the protections. It is next on the list man. Bold and caps don't make it faster..

50k credits per player kill seems a bit steep. I'm not against rewards, but lets be a bit more reasonable. I dont see why kills and new ship costs should have better than a 1 to 1 ratio. And what about a decent Revenant pilot.. if he blasts one guy and then dies, he's just made 35k credits even including replacing his ship. 20k I'd listen to, even though a vulture mk3 pilot would still turn a profit with a pathetic 1 to 1 ratio of kills to deaths.

fighter pilots of all nations, strike now!

we want paychecks!

@Aramarth

Bold and caps may actually help. The only time in VO i have seen them react promptly on some exploit was when money was involved. They gutted the guy who did it.
Faction system exploits that pissed off majority of VO players have been going on for years and we all know who exploiters are - VO is a small community, we know all their names and chars.

Imho, suggestion about Search & Destroy mission is good.
Lucky for the rest of us mortals, decision about it is in the hands of Inc, Andy, Ray and Michael and not their pizza delivery boy.

And for being reasonable... I think 50000 credits reward per kill is very reasonable.
The whole idea about this is to make money (profit) the military way.

God forbid fighter pilots can make some profit without boring trading and mining, preposterous, how dare I suggest something like that when "a vulture mk3 pilot would still turn a profit with a pathetic 1 to 1 ratio of kills to deaths".
So what?
Why is it normal for a trader to get millions in one trade run and some lousy and pathetic combat pilot cannot earn some pocket change by doing his trade - killing enemy pilots?

I actually really liked the old Liberation and Liquidation missions. It'd be cool to see them come back, in one form or another.

I like the condition in Search and Destroy, bullet C. For killing all POS characters...
The fact that you CAN be all POS demonstrates how borked the faction system really is. In my view it messes the game up way and beyond what the economy ever did.

That aside, I do not think you should have a per hour salary. A bonus for winning CtC, winning BS and whatever all those missions are called would be better I think. The winners should after all be rewarded for their efforts whereas the losers should go cry and train harder;)

Yknow, you're right. Why should I have to trade to make a living.. 50k it is.

with further thoughts into this, i've been thinking that the moment you enroll in either nation military missions (like the one you need to take to be able to take border skirmish), then you should get a paycheck. a hourly cash bonus just for being in the military.

I like making money killing

Every so often ill spend an hour doing combat but i only come out with like 200k meanwhile some lame guy in a moth has made like 1.5 to 3mil in that same time

But at least I'm cool compared to them :P

Don't think time-based wages are a good idea. Rewards should be mission-based along the lines of payment for mission completion (more than enough to cover cost of ship/weapons) with bonuses applied for completion of secondary goals such as killing enemy players/NPCs or expedited mission completion. However, more missions and mission-types (Recon/Strike/BDA/CAP/Interdiction) needed for military. Bounty-type missions for UIT would be appropriate.

Escort type missions should be a military activity, too (and give rewards of that type). Characteristically, merchant navies do not do the fighting themselves.

I think search and destroy is a necessity now with increased ship prices. You should definitely have a way to get paid for killing opposing nation players.

Anyone every try Pirates of the Burning Sea? It was a MMO that came out not too long ago, lots of hype and interest during beta and pre-launch. I even tried it for a little bit as well. A month after launch, they lost so many players that most of their servers were barren. This happened for a variety of reasons but the most glaring one was this: The game was designed to largely focus on PvP, but PvP risk was far greater than PvP reward. As a result, even the hardcore PvPers found themselves avoiding PvP unless they were confident that they were going to win. This meant that solo PvP was virtually impossible. Any players travelling by themselves in a PvP area were ganked by a full group 99% of the time. Even full groups would run from other full groups if they thought there was a chance that they might lose their higher end equipment. The entire game almost went under and still might.

What should be taken away from this is that if the game is going to largely revolve around PvP (which it does), there has to be a reward that is equal to or greater than the risk of PvP. Money is the easy solution. Reward players for PvP kills. Tokens or loot items are another option, but I'll post more about that in another thread. Either way, there has to be a larger reward than what there currently is.

When I made this post I was governed by the idea of improvements that can be implemented in a matter of day or two, without any new time consuming coding and programming.
Something like a quick fix to make life easier for fighter pilots.

CTC, BP and BS exist so its just a matter of tweaking rewards a bit.

We had Liberation, Liquidation & Bounty missions before that worked fine and payed cash so Search & Destroy mission could be based on them.

PvP combat is an essential, very attractive and quite unique part of VO.
Enabling fighter pilots to base their existence in VO on good PvP mission will bring a new quality to VO.

P.S. Ghost's tokens idea is very good too and maybe a better solution in the long run.

I think the token idea is a good one- just have all player ships drop something akin to the Hive processor cores when destroyed, perhaps their Identify Friend/Foe systems. It wouldn't matter who exactly it was, it would only matter that they were the enemy and you gave them a plasma-enhanced exhaust system cleaning. Anyone that's a part of the nation military can turn in the IFF systems for a decent lump of credits. This may be the best option in the short term, as the type of IFF dropped can be made dependent upon the type of ship destroyed- blowing up an enemy EC-89 gets you a few hundred, but if you manage to blow up an enemy Valk/Prom, especially if they're in the hands of the wrong faction, you could gain upwards of a half million.

UIT players would lose out on the direct cash flow, but we tend to be the traders/miners by default and thus get our money from those activities. Plus, who says we couldn't gather up the IFF systems and sell them to Itani/Serco pilots for a cut of the cash?

The only players who would really lose out in this situation are the true pirates, and I anticipate that once the faction system changes go through, the new Unaligned pirates would be able to do exactly the same by taking the IFF systems from all three nations to Corvus stations, and being compensated "for keeping the oppression of the nations at bay".

The main downside is that players could conspire to "crossfeed"- deliberately allowing themselves to be destroyed to give IFF systems to the enemy, in exchange for swapping roles and getting a load of their own. This would necessitate IFF system values that are roughly equivalent to slightly more than those of the ships involved, so expenditure would roughly equal income for crossfeeders, making doing anything but crossfeeding more profitable. Restricting the turn-in locations to their aligned stations should also work.

I like the idea. Really. But I see a problem with it.

Remember why bounties are gone? Well, this system can be exploited the same way. The least we can do with it is to state that killing EC-89 will not give any reward. Also maybe killing the same player over and over and over should not reward as much (which is lame with online numbers we Europeans see, and still can be walked around)

Any drop or reward for PvP should be determined by ship as well as level to discourage farming. I would argue that Ec-89s drop nothing at all as would players under combat level 5. Other ways to discourage farming could be done with limits, like aleksey mentioned. Say after the fifth kill of the same player, they cease to drop tokens or give any reward at all for the next hour (4 hours? 8 hours?).