I was thinking that some cargo items (either some new ones or existing ones modified to have the effect) should affect the size and damage of your ship's explosion. Make them required for a lot of manufacture/procurement missions and now you've got a new factor in play, with a lot of little intricacies added to gameplay:

-Friends defending you while hauling precious cargo? They better be careful.
-You could add unique cargo that can't be pirated, only lost.
-An additional use for the cargo scanner/UDV/Greyhound, giving you extra info on the hauler you're about to hit.
-Expanding on the point above, punishing blindly attacking trading vessels up close without learning more first.

Downsides:

-You could have players deliberately load up on these in order to bomb stationary targets/groups of players. As far as I'm concerned, it's about as valid as launching an avalon at point blank range. And slower, if anything - a player would either have to be stationary for ten seconds to self-destruct, or rely on someone shooting them.

-If the cargo blew up with the ship, it'd be unretrievable. I think that can be worked into a feature ("hey, you have to collect this peacefully" and "you better be careful with this stuff cause you can't get it back"). You could even work an additional feature in, where hauling this stuff means nothing gets dropped after death. This would discourage players from mixing it in with their cargo just to spite attackers unless they're willing to accept losing their other cargo in the process.

As far as damage, I don't know what would be best. It could scale linearly (1 cu of explosive cargo = 50 more damage to your explosion, meaning an XC full would do an additional 10000 damage), or you could scale it logarithmically, meaning small amounts would do a good bit of damage, but as you add more it scales off, keeping the damage from becoming ridiculous. I'm definitely open to feedback; this idea just popped into my head.

+1. The explosive cargo should also increase the explosion radius. The damage properties of different explosive items can be different, with different buffs to damage or radius based on what item it is and how many there are in cargo. Maybe we could also incorporate some factor based on the surroundings or what weapon the ship is shot with.

Why manufacture this item when there is already explosives as a cargo item?

Sorry if I wrote that unclearly - explosives would be purchasable as normal. I’m just thinking certain manufacturable parts could also have the explosive property. For example, the 198cu reactor says “care should be taken during shipping” or something to that effect, and I think a couple other missions have similar quips regarding their cargo.

Also maybe the rarer ores (helio, pentric, lanth) as well as SSS could be made explosive.

+1 all in favour of explosive cargo types! Also if a player is carrying or has mines equipped with ammo remaining upon death the mines explode too (this would make cargo scanners a necessity for pirates as someone could be carrying a TU mine for example.

A lot of people may be against this but just outright make the reactor explode if u get killed while carrying, an explosion next to (or in this case, literally encasing) a Nuclear reactor would have devastatingly high yield explosive results, for all parties involved Hauler and pirate alike.

"It could be scaled linearly (1 cu of explosive cargo = 50 more damage to your explosion, meaning an XC full would do an additional 10000 damage), or you could scale it logarithmically" as we're talking explosives here it feels like linear is the way to go, bigger the payload bigger the bang right?

+1 for OP
+1 for Archong420 idea about ammo exploding on death.
in my opinion ALL equiped/hauled addon ammo should explode.
it would make addon scanner must have as some players could carry an ungrouped Ava for pirating protection. Also it will be possible to solo a Levi with Rocket/flare loaded moth

I find ammo exploding to be excessive, honestly. If someone is bombing with avalons, they’re basically untouchable. Way too much griefing potential with not a lot of recourse. The cargo would be a lot easier to balance, especially seeing as something with a truly huge damage potential would be exceptionally rare/difficult to obtain (a reactor) or have to be hauled in such large amounts that it would only have griefing potential in a large ship (moth) and thus easy to kill from a safe distance.

other threads same topic
https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/30710#368338
https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/35936#413987

+1