Originally by: Nariko Tenrai

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Edited by: Nariko Tenrai on 09/06/2004 22:21:16
I've done a fair bit of convoy raiding, liberating slaves from the Amarr and Ammatar. First thing you should know is that, so far as I've seen, convoys are never generated in systems with only one station. The reason is simple.

Convoys travel from one station in a system to another. They launch, crawl about 170 km from their station, then disappear. Shortly thereafter, they reappear about 170km away from another station in the system. Use this to your advantage! Never attack a convoy leaving a station. Instead, look at their heading and check stations in that path once they jump out. Unless the destination station is of the same corp as their departure station, you can attack them with no worries about the sentry guns.

So you may be wondering, in case of doubt, how can you tell what corp a convoy belongs to? Simple. Bring along a cargo scanner and use it. NPCs don't aggro for use of scanners (though, strangely enough, Concord will eat you alive if you use one on another player). Once you know the various commodities the convoy is carrying, look up the info for all the stations in the system, then click on the corporate logo to get to their owners' information. Click the "Market Activity" tab under the corp info panel. Everything you find in a corporation's convoys will be listed in the "buys" or "sells" area. For example, the Civic Court's convoys will always carry a mix of Polytextiles, Slaves, Pax Amarria, Frozen Food, and Frozen Plant Seeds. If the ships you've scanned are carrying anything else, they're not from Civic Court.

Incidentally, you should also use this panel to pick targets. Check the various corps to see what they buy and sell. Pick one that deals in items you want. Pull up the galaxy map and hit the button at the bottom of the corp info panel that says "show stations" (or something similar, I don't recall precisely). All systems with a station owned by that corp will be highlighted green. Pick a target nearby and get to work.

Note that you will lose standing to the victim corp, and ATM the only way to recoup this is by running missions for them. After you get below a certain level of standing (I'm unsure what it is exactly), you will no longer be allowed to dock at that corp's stations. Formerly, you also lost faction standing based on the nationality of the victim corp and the sovereignty of the system the attack took place in. This seems to be disabled or broken at the moment, but it's something to be aware of should things change.

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