Is there a way to gain an escort via a mission? Similar to the way you would hire them from the bar?

That is, credits to hire and maintain, and trader AI types giving you non-outfit cargo space.

I believe you can do that by having a silent mission (with the escort), a negative pay silent mission with pay on abort, and a crön used to determine when that mission is aborted and started (basically, you set it so that the silent mission sets a bit that kicks off the crön, and every X days, the crön aborts the negative pay mission and starts it again).
You could actually combine the two silent missions, come to think of it.

The AI Trader idea is entirely based on the shďp resource; I believe it does not make a distinction between captured escorts and mission-based escorts I think so, anyway.

The only problem with this method is that you cannot dismiss your escort. Maybe by making the mission a visible “abortable" one, you could simulate the effect

The only way I see to give to do that is with Special Ships or Auxiliary Ships, neither of which provide cargo space when used this way.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 11 September 2006 - 12:22 PM

God, you guys think in-the-box. How about giving the player a cargo outfit?

He specifically wanted " non-outfit cargo space". Ie, the kind of space escorts provide that you can't retool into something else.

Well, technically you can have the hiring mission automatically give a player an outfit which adds cargo (which would be invisible) and have it be removed when aborting or cancelling the hiring escort contract. The disadvantage would be having to create individual outfit to add the matching amount of cargo space to different ships which can take up lots of outfit slots.

Oops, for some reason the last two post before mine didn't get loaded up so I didn't you posted about non-outfit cargo issue before.

This post has been edited by Coraxus : 11 September 2006 - 08:08 PM

Not exactly what you're looking for, but it's simple enough to gain the option to hire a certain escort from a mission. Obviously this can't stop you from hiring six of them, so it's no good for a "This freighter captain's decided to follow you around and do what you tell him, his name's Fred" type mission.