Well having had a good look at what we have so far and considered it from a player’s point of view I would be grabbing ships left and right.
Any ship not crippled when we took it would be flown off whenever possible. Expand the harrier’s crew and pack in as many people as possible for prize crews.
Then use the harrier for raids and a steadily expanding fleet to carry the stolen cargos to sale, go in with the harrier for fighting and a Subby to take the loot after boarding. You can put 20 people on the Subby, thats a decent sized boarding team and a few skilled looters. With cross skills you have a prize crew as well.
With half a dozen people looting the cargo onto your ship through the cargo hatch you can shift 1Dton a minute; the boarding squad can grab the passenger’s personal treasure one passenger per minute then spend 10 or 20 minutes to clear out the stores and ships supplies.
Things like the safe are too slow unless you take the ship.
You will need a lot of good intel to be successful at this. If a ship is crippled during your attack you loot it fast and leave. If its drives are intact then put the prize crew aboard and take it. Hit ships that are heading out since they are moving away from the security types and will have full fuel tanks. Though you have to be quick or they will jump to safety.
Have some civilian ships doing legal runs, identify ships that are crew owned, ships that are company owned etc. Once you get a rep for taking ships if the crew are owners they will fight harder. On the other hand the company owned ships are unlikely to fight to the death to protect a company ship.
You will need to develop a reputation for being ruthless under certain circumstances.
When the harrier lights up its drives and active sensors to lock a target then orders the ship to heave to “Or Else” the target ship’s crew needs to understand that crippling their ship or fighting back will result in them being executed. On the other hand if they cut drives, surrender the ship and perform no sabotage or do nothing to resist you then they will be treated well and released unharmed. Aside from fanatics few people will die to protect a ship owned by a bunch of fat cat directors who have never been in danger in their pampered lives, a few thousand credits a month isn’t worth dying for to protect the profit of people on a hundred times your salary.
This is where good intel comes in and a decent ground agent on many worlds is well worth the cost. Having even a partial list of ships so you can see who is heading out and identify the crew, ownership status and company loyalty changes the target list and allows you to pick the ones that are less likely to fight. Plus ships may arrive at random times but departures are fixed. A ship may jump in across a period of ours and you cannot linger that long. On the other hand a ship with a 15 minute take off window is much easier to anticipate and hit.
Plus a few bribes to get general cargo lists for ships. Never hit the “Too good to be true, vast fortune being moved secretly” cargos, they are pirate hunter traps
Once you know who the crew owned ships are either avoid them or just loot them and let them go, if they heave to and do not resist just take the cargo and passengers valuables. Again once word spreads that you only steal company ships and simply loot and leave crew owned ships then the resistance levels will drop a bit.
You can also hide what you are doing somewhat. If you are mostly hitting the ships from a select group of companies across 6 or 8 worlds you can also spread rumours its a trade war and set up other companies to be blamed. Or maybe work with smaller companies to buy the loot while they are able to expand into the areas left by the large companies you are hitting. After all a big part of this adventure is making friends to support the returned Kingdom.
