Why don't HOP abandon ship anymore?

[Stretchytall]

The first HOP freighter I attacked abandoned ship quite readily. But now, the pilots all dump their cargo and run until the escape or die. Why aren't they abandoning ship anymore? I want to get another freighter.

[DaBa]

Bail has a low chance of happening and is governed by a cooldown system. I don't remember specific values so take this with a grain of salt because I might be wrong on specifics:

If ship takes damage when it's below 70% hull and 20% shields the game runs a check to see if any of the crew abandon ship. The chance is low, around 30% and is further modified by crew's morale and the hull/shields of the ship, so for best chances you want to get ship to very low hull and very low shields without destroying it, I always keep the ship at 10% hull and keep the shields below 10% myself to be sure I have good odds. There is also a cooldown on it, if you attack the ship and the check fails, the game waits around 30 seconds before it checks again.

Also you don't need to attack to trigger the check, you can comm the ship you're in combat with and if there is a chance for the crew to bail, you will get an option to demand the ship to surrender. If the check succeeds, the crew will abandon ship, if it doesn't the captain will tell you to piss off and you will have to wait those 30 seconds to try again. You will also know if the cooldown is still in effect (or if the ship is too healthy) if you comm them and they straight up tell you that they won't talk to you. So you can use this to check the cooldown.

An example process would look like this: Get the ship's hull down to 10% and the shields as low as possible. Whenever the shields go above 20%, attack the ship and get them as low as possible again. During this comm the ship every few seconds and when you get an option to demand surrender, choose it and see if any of the crew abandon ship. If they don't, repeat the process until successful.

Also worth noting if the ship has a lot of crew, you will have to get them to abandon ship multiple times, until everybody is gone. You can check the progress if you scan the ship beforehand and monitor the amount of crew, you will see the number decrease too if you are successful. Lastly, this only works with S and M ships, L and XL ships can also have their crews bail but only up to a threshold, to capture the ship you need to board it with marines. Also worth noting that a lot of ships that are a part of story missions will never bail and cannot be boarded so don't even bother.