Talk:Ships/@comment-198.84.137.41-20160115230809/@comment-27311754-20160116004854
That depends on your budget and their freighter. The two things to watch out for are that you want something manoeuvrable and it needs to move as fast as or faster than the freighter.
You generally want to do one of two things; if they focus on the freighter(s) then you want to kill them quickly, if they move to engage the escort then you want to buy the freighter(s) time to jump out and then follow them yourself. The first favours a ship with lots of guns, the second a ship with lots of shields / armour. Either way, you want something manoeuvrable which can either keep the enemy in its sights or keep itself out of the enemy's.
If you are playing in a private group, a fully-upgraded Eagle MkII will run to a couple of million credits, but can take down NPC pirates in anything up to and including Vultures if you are careful and it's hard for most NPCs to hit. For PvP, I'd say an Eagle is too much of a risk because any good PvP pilot will just turn off flight-assist and kill you while still flying parallel to the freighter. The low-budget PvP option would be a Diamondback Scout (500,000 cr) maybe, moving up to an Imperial Courier (2,500,00 cr and need to grind Empire faction for this one) and then a Vulture (5,000,000 cr) is about as high as you go before you run out of manoeuvrable ships.
In my opinion, escorts can also make best use of high-DPS weapons with small clips. You shouldn't see too many battles between stations (unlike pirates and bounty-hunters who will try to stay out as long as they can) and so weapons like the Fragment Cannon (deadly on an Eagle) or a Missile Rack (always strip the shields first) are quite viable. If you have the skill to use them and the right ship, the Railgun and Plasma Accelerator are also good for bringing fights to a quick conclusion.
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