Oolite Bulletins

does taking a contract in contraband affect your legal status? I seem to be having trouble finding contracts in other items at the moment, but do not want to wreck my clean rating. . .

Try buying out the contraband before checking the contracts...then sell the same back to the station before accepting a contract.
You only get a hit on your legal status if you leave the station with contraband.

Yes, and big-time.

You get a bounty for each ton of illegal stuff that you transport out of a main station. It doesn't matter how you acquired the stuff in the first place.

Contracts tend to be about many tons, thus the resulting bounty would be high, and get higher and higher for each main station you're docking with along the route.

Your question caused me to think so I took a contract of 56 tonnes of firearms from 1 side of the galaxy to the other side.. a total of 22 jumps.
I have a griff boa that is my hauler so I emptied out the missile racks save 1. the other 7 had fuel tanks. Then I skipped each jump.. didn't dock once and after 1 jump, I went to offender, after 5 jumps, I was clean all the way to delivery. I ran the route using the more but shorter hops and that is where the extra fuel came in. If I was close to the bar, Jut add the fuel and hop out... otherwise those scoops are quite handy. Why bother with galcop if you don't have to.
Yah-Ta-Hey

Or go sunskimming. That was the only safe technique in the old days. Combine that with the fact that in Elite/vanilla Oolite your bounty wears of quite quickly, and hauling large quantities of illegal goods only ever becomes a problem in the 15 seconds between first launching and jumping out.

Thargoid wrote:

Or just use a fuel station, or indeed any other dockable entity which sells fuel except the system main station.

It just means you can't save your game along the route...

I was going to say when I saw this thread, Fuel Stations/Satellites are your friend.