The first step to generating profits is to perfect your flyby boarding methodology. I would suggest yeeting PIO Freelancers for no rep penalty and then selling the equipment off of them for an easy 500k. Once you have several Katanas load them with marines and board a relatively undefended L Trader. I would suggest a ARG/ANT Sonra or Incarcatua due to their ability to house a small city (I find that these vessels like to hang out next to the PIO Spacelab in Segaris).

Once you have perfected your flyby boarding on consenting L Traders, you should have capacity for many more marines to be yeeted on to more unsuspecting consenting ships. Now what you want to find is a PIO Auxiliary Honshu. These boys can come in heavily infested and basically free forms, so I would try to find one of the latter category.

Go ahead and yeet the Honshu with your perfected flyby boarding methods. If you emulate me, you'll have like 7 boys on the Honshu who refuse to "evacuate" and might require multiple boarding cycles.

By the end of the process you should have a brand-new Honshu to add to your Katanas and Argon Ls.

At this point you might think the strategy is to pawn the newly acquired (slightly used) Honshu to the nearest large shipyard in Antigone Memorial or even in Brennan's Triumph if you want to be cheeky an sell PIO their ship back.

However, you would be mistaken. Now comes the fraud-or at least fraud adjacent behavior.

Our previously acquired Katanas will be the perfect vehicle to begin your world-dominating fraud.

Park your auxiliary right next to an equipment dock or wharf. Bring your Katanas to said auxiliary and upgrade their software (I liked to select the whole group of naked Katanas because I'm lazy like that). Once they all have their software take them through the dock and go ahead and sell said software because the ships really don't need it. Each ship should net you around 97k.

Send them back to the auxiliary and download your lawfully licensed software once more. Sell the dock the software once more. Repeat infinitely to generate much profits.

This is not the best method to generate credits mid-late game because it generates no resources to spur on AI economies and fight the space bugs. However, it excels early game because it removes no resources from AI economies.

If you are dissatisfied with the rate your Katanas are generating profits, and you really want BDE you can begin buying naked S ships to repeat the process. And then yeet more auxiliary ships. I liked to create fleets of 100 and cycle them through. Takes about 5 minutes per cycle and generates 9.5m for each fleet. Each time the PIO field a new Honshu, I yeet it, park it next to a wharf/equipment dock and spin up another "reserve" fighter fleet.

All of the profits go towards spurring on my local economy which becomes the real money maker in the mid-late game.