Well, my carreer has taken a criminal look. I shoot police/cargo/Bh's on sight. All criminal factions LOVE me. All law abiding factions hate my guts. It's a good life. Being a goody goody will get very booooooring at some point.

My other char is a goody goody. That's why I mostly play with my evil side

I thought at first your topic heading was some sort of new math in the Freelancer Universe.

Crimnal Fractions / rebels = Gaians

Or something of that sort.

Spectre

yes, because i think some of the fractions / groups
more are like rebels, fighting for the farmers' rights for example.

One interesting thing is this: if you are a trader then your reputation stays the same for very long periods of time, because reputation is not affected by the things that you do in your line of work. But having the right reputation is very important for getting around unharassed and for having access to lucrative trades, and so an experienced trader tends to be very aware of things that affect reputation and carefully tunes it with a bribe here and a few shots there.

On the other hand, fighters are constantly changing their reputation by the things they do. Rep is not very important for a fighter and once you have a decent ship with decent equipment rep ceases to matter completely. But if you understand the intricate web of relations between the factions then you can get there easier with less effort. So, if you watch carefully who (or what) you shoot and who you fly missions for then the right factions will be friendly enough at the right time so that you get the equipment/ships/missions that you want without having to pay bribes and without marring your rep sheet by flying too many missions for a well-hated faction.

If you kill indiscriminately everything that attacks you and don't watch for who you do jobs against who then things can get pretty bad after a while: many factions shoot you on sight, and those that don't shoot are not friendly enough to sell decent kit (if they have any). So it is better to have a rough plan where you want your rep to go; in particular, you will have to pick one of the two major criminal powers because there are some things that nobody else can provide (except in MP where you can get another player to buy stuff for you). Once you have made your choice it is a simple matter to select jobs accordingly.

Also, it pays to know how strongly (or weakly) some factions react to a ship or depot of theirs being destroyed. If a faction cares little about their own - like the 'northern' power - then your reputation will not change much even if you shoot plenty of them. On the other hand, if a faction does react strongly then you need to shoot only a few in order to improve your rep with their enemies.

At this moment my pilot is the most wanted pilot in Sirius. All government houses, Police houses, BountyHunters and trading compagnies seriously hate my gutts. All criminal factions ADORE me

A fully equipped Sabre mounted with 2 Nomad blasters, 2 Nomad Canons and 2 Kraken type 2 weapons and a Adv Brigadine lvl10 shield is capable is fencing off almost everyone. There is only one opponent that makes me pull everything out of my Sabre and those are the GMG. With their Sunblasts/Skyblast weapons they are doing lots of damage in a very short time. (Sky/Sunblast has a ref rate of 8.33 O.o)

So yeah, going trough "civilised" space is a pain, but not a real pain. Most of their weapons don't harm me much. Of course I don't just "hang" around in space. I kill for cash, no matter who I need to kill. (No PK tho, only NPC's) When I'm using a tradelane and it's hacked, I kill the ones that hack my tradelane and they still love me

The only problem you will have in the beginning is that you don't really know where all the criminal' bases are. So the exploring is a big part. Also, I really loved to get a few "legit" jobs at Manhattan first and then when I get my Patriot I go and start my baddass campaign.

I also have a goody goody char but that one is mostly unused now. It gets kinda boring because I only get attacked when I'm venturing outside the patrol routes or when I go cloud-exploring :/

I'm in love with the corsairs
Outcasts and hackers are fine as well, but junkers or xeno's or red hessians suck tho
Really, playing the 'good' guy is fun for a while, and it's only use is trading (which is extremely boring imho, but i can understand peepz doing it). It's way more fun placing yourself in front of a capital planet (say New Berlin) and shoot everthing coming from the trade lane's

being a trader is borring?? um that just depends on where you trade yea trading boron betten leeds and new york can be but go out to the independant worlds it can get rough, fast when your the only one aginst 20 outcast, and try smugeling artifacts or cardimne in to manhatten when your rep is good with LPI,LN.LFS (makes it bad with outcast and ect.) the criminal fractions/rebels make the game intersting

You say the fighting is the 'interesting' part of trading (beside hoping not being scanned ..) ... it would be kind of faster just to shoot em all, instead of waiting for them to shoot at you
I myself traded a bit, at what i heard was a 'good' traderoute (about 1500 / piece you make), throughsome sigma systems (thus with lots of bad boys, who were hostile) .. easy money, but still boring

well i use lots of jump holes to avoid being scaned and don't use the trade lanes in the major house systems and stick to the pirates patrol routes so it ends up being a constant fight till i get to dock