I've just been flying around shooting things for a while and losing lots of expensive ships in PvP so funds are dwindling.

What's the quickest way to recover a healthy balance ? I'm only 4/4/4/4 so don't have a moth so centaur is my biggest capacity ship.

Escort missions are highly variable from 5k to 300k per trip so 10 minutes work. Pirating is a waste of time as the chances of finding anybody prepared to pay is quite low - it normally just turns into a PvP opportunity. Any other suggestions ?

Get a cargo scanner, take an escort mission, undock and scan the cargo contents. If it's something not very valuable, abandon, try again. That's one way of ensuring a profitable escort mission.

Work on unlocking the heavy miner behemoth if you actually want to do large scale commodity trading. You need to mine and sell 15,000 cu of ore. Yes it is tedious, unless you enjoy mining as some of us do, but it's the highest cargo capacity ship available to free players. Come back to this thread once you've unlocked it and I can explain to you the wonders of commodity trading.

regarding what Captain Spry said about escort missions, even if they aren't great, if the faction being escorted isnt the same as the faction who moniters the space you are in, you could abort the mission, pop the convoy, and scoop up their load. if you're not sure, do it in greyspace.

if you can be bothered to 😜

anyways, yeah, its not so much random as much as that escort's payout is based mostly on the trade mechanics already in the game. If you do a few escort or trade procurement missions, you'll find commodities that would sell well on normal trade routes. weapons tend to pay better, but not always.

cargo scanners can be bought from your nation's capitol for cheap.

The tung mining maud holds 60 cargo.

Do procurement missions for tung till you can buy one. Then use that to get the mining moth.

Learn to pvp in a hog2.

Well all considering you're F2P, weps trading is out of the picture due to crystals. Try finding a regular commodity that pays well, maybe even daily trade routes? Never tried them so i don't know if they are good or not, But i always used to do procurememt missions(bonus: it ups your standing as well, so pick a place you need to up or fix ideally). Hope that helps.

Some great suggestions here, thanks. I already have good standing with Tunguska so the Maud is a great suggestion, tbh I'd completely forgotten about it. I still have one moth left as well but I keep forgetting that I'm hated at Orion and then wonder why everybody is shooting at me when I try and dock :)

I'll get the maud and then pop some convoys should more profitable than escorting them ; thanks !

I guess I can also sell IHDPC's but they take a little while to assemble all the ingredients and you're limited to 5 per day.