Fri Nov 03, 2006 3:11 pm by Dev
The traditional approach is to exploit the following behavior of NPCs as they scan your cargo. The best I have seen so far is a hack of... either content.dll or common.dll, I don't recall which, that prevents the scanning NPC from demanding that you drop your cargo. This is also coupled with altering the audio file for cargo scan initiation so that it does not time out (or something along those lines, it's been a while since I reverse-engineered it). You then set the faction that will run escort duty to scan for a certain type of equipment; players can equip this thing and then the first squadron of ships from that faction will follow the player everywhere (except between solar systems). However, this hack does not work in single player; it is conceivable that a similar hack could be done to make it work in SP, but I have not seen such a thing.
Anyway, for details, look into the 88 flak mod or any other mod that uses their NPC wingman system. You will probably notice that in 88 flak, the audio for initiating a cargo scan has been replaced with the audio for ships that come to assist you during a mission; presumably this is part of the haxx applied to common/content.dll (whichever it was).