Something Mom said above strikes me as odd.

Some convoy routes seem to produce consistent voy ship and cargo compositions. How is this occurring if their cargo selection is random?

The cargo isn't exactly random. If someone buys a bunch of Aquean ore in Sedina L-2, then convoys will be sent there to replenish that station's stock of Aquean.

oh really

/me invests 50million in sedina chocolates muwahahaha

The cargo isn't exactly random. If someone buys a bunch of Aquean ore in Sedina L-2, then convoys will be sent there to replenish that station's stock of Aquean.

what???
when did that happen?
that's interesting, indeed.

and, moldy. it's easy to make a couple million in an hour popping voys. or it used to be. but it's way easier for traders to make more. SO.....

would be really nice if the escorts were proportional to the value of the cargo, for escorts like they have now, things in the 3-5k range maybe, for things like loads of swarms or Sedina chocolates, id say buff the escorts even more. But for junk, let the moths go with just a single vulture or something, the cargo will be easy to steal but not worth much.

I kinda expected to get alot of flak from traders, simply because they don't want us to make money, not because it hurts them in any way for us to make money popping voys. Actually it can at times distract us from shooting them.

We prefer that you trade so we can pirate you like you do to us.

well yeah. of course the traders don't want us to make money.
especially those who have stated time and time again that they think VO would be much better without pirates altogether.
c'mon now.
i think the proportional thing is quite reasonable. why would ANY
corporation, in their right mind, pay a TON of defenders on some cargo that is more or less worthless? i understand that every widget in the game is supposed to be important in some way, to someone, but COME ON!!1! three WTDs 3 vults and a couple cents guarding a moth and an atlas or two full of silicate ore?

i DID pull some nice cargo off a convoy yesterday, but the ratio of damage done to cargo pulled in was disproportional, to say the least. there were more defenders guarding the silicate ore than there were the Cybernetics Grade EE.

to all of the traders, vipers, and whoever else that wants to see pirates have an even harder time in vo, or their roles be taken out of vo all together: don't forget, you're not the only ones playing this game, and if it were not for the piracy option in Vendetta Online, i, like MANY other people would abandon vo completely. just because YOU don't find it to be fun, or maybe suck at it a little, doesn't mean we are not a part of VO and are here to stay. so, if the devs throw us a bone, and give us something to do once in a while, keep the bullshit to yourselves.
think about how much work hard work the devs are putting into every other aspect of VO that is for YOU, and that we pirates have no interest in. *cough wheredidthatliquidationmissiongo cough*
excuse me!

>.>
mmmm coffee!

I just look at it this way, a trader can make a 1 system escort mission and get 600,000 credits easily. A pirate kills the same escort and makes maybe 100,000. Thats not much of a goldmine.

Pirating has never been profitable, the people say it is probably havnt decided to exclusively pirate. On the contrary though, trading has always been insanely profitable, how many traders have well over 20 million credits. Id say if they have been playing for any amount of time (say, a month or two) all of them.

If the amount that could be gain by killing a convoy(hard) was proportional to the amount gained by escorting one(easy) It would be more properly balanced. Perhaps make corvus offer convoy killer missions with large monetary awards upon delivering of the stolen cargo, that would offset it nicely, and could lead to a nifty mission string. Perhaps make it the string end up with you getting a fast convoy killer type ship.

Oddball behavior: took down an Ineubis convoy last night. After killing the TD, Cent and two vultures, the yield of cargo from two moth heavies and one taur was:

Scrap, scrap and more scrap. Not one piece of cargo in their holds.

Momer said there was some odds that cargo would be destroyed when a ship was. My question is why doesn't this also happen to player ships? I think there should be some risk that destroying a player trader also damages or destroys some or all of their cargo.

As far as the rest of this goes, I don't think it matters too much until there is a functional new economy. Finding water and SAND being transported accross interstellar space is completely stupid anyway. What intelligent species would shove WATER into a cargo ship?

Evian, Perrier, Desani, Crystal Geyser...

You're right, no intelligent species would do that.

Well, beyond that, not all stations are built on giant IceYos. It has to be shipped to keep people alive, dood.

also, these days, they truck water into baghdad.

so, every time you blow up a water convoy in this game, you are basically acting just like al qaeda.

I've seen some systems that look like they were in baghdad too...

But from what I'm hearing, it seems like the stations have replicators, and re-sequence the silicate to make what they need... They need convoys with reactor fuel, station parts and such. I find myself on the pirate's side here. They seem to be well misbalanced to our happy little escort missions in blue-space that fund my suicide missions at the serco border. The convoys seem to need a little more variety, and thought into their cargo, depending on what kind of stations there are, but I'm not complaining until after the economy.

Basically, every commodity required for living has to be shipped from and to space stations, since we obviously have no way of reaching planets. I mean, do you think the people on the ISS live on stardust and solar wind? And build the station out of by-flying rocks and scrap?

I don't know any numbers, but I think for a station to be truly autarkic, it would need a size much bigger than the present ones, and they would probably have to have some sort of biosphere.

I can't think of a single station that lacks a local ice roid, and roids don't run out of crap to mine. Still proportional escorts would be really nice, then we can even size up the value of the cargo before we go blasting the crap out of it.

Water being one of the most important elements from a human point of view, I doubt that some stations can satisfy their need for water by mining the nearby roids, and some sectors with stations have a downright lack of them.

Let's just accept the ice/sand voys and move on, yes?

Seriously, OUR stations; our tiny, miniscule stations really need THAT much water?

also every single system has MASSIVE ice rocks anyway, no real need to ship it across 4 systems. Even if a station lacks a giant ice ball in the same sector as it theres going to be one nearby. So no, convoys of ice aren't needed, at least not interstellar convoys, and certainly not ones defended by a small fleet.

It'd be really cool if convoys carried different things based on where they come from, a convoy from a mining station might carry things like steel and xrite alloy, to commercial stations and manufacturing stations, a commercial station would ship out consumer goods; cloths, consumer robotics, etc. a manufacturing station should ship out manufactured good not meant to be used by consumers; weapon and ship parts, heavy engineering, etc and possibly some illicit booze from time to time. A barracks should ship in weapon components and out completed weapons.