A. Acquiring Good Alignment

What's the most cost effective way to get good alignment?

I was just wondering this myself when I was faced with getting alignment early in a new game,  so I constructed a list of the various ways to up alignment and their costs.  If anyone can contribute additions or corrections, this might fit nicely into someone's TW guide.

(1) POST REWARDS ON EVIL PLAYERS - cr 1,000/al. pt.  Not available to negatively aligned players.  If the object of the bounty is locatable, reward money may be recouped almost immediately.

(2) PAY TAXES - cr 1,500/al. pt.  Not available to negatively aligned players.  Has no return and no possibility of recouping the money.  In a new game recently, with no evil players to post on,  I pulled all my money out of the bank and proceeded to quit and reenter the game, paying taxes until my alignment reached 500.  This may sound stupid, but read on.

(3) BUILD PLANETS - cr 2,000/al. pt.  Not available to negatively aligned players.  Returns are you get to keep the planet.  Hopefully,  this was something you were planning on doing anyway, but it's a long way to 500 alignment points doing this.

(4) KILL BAD GUYS - Cost varies.  An evil trader or alien with -250 alignment and 200 fighters in a merchant will cost you about cr 400 / al. pt.  Trouble is,  finding them takes time and turns that should go into something more productive.  It is difficult to adopt a productive strategy that maximizes the chance of running into one of these guys early in the game.  My original strategy was to e-probe like mad for them in the beginning.  I benefited from the information greatly, but even shooting off 50-75 e-probes a day, it was like finding a needle in a hay stack.  If you want a method that will get the desired alignment in a short period of time, this one is too open ended.  Nevertheless, there are bargains out there, so if you run across one, check the alien list in your computer and see if he's worth the cost.

(5) UPGRADING PORTS - cr 5,000 /al. pt.  This method can provide future returns if you can control the area around the port(s).  It is also the most expensive.

(6) KILLING EVIL (or ROGUE) FIGHTERS - +-1800 / al. pt.  When you attack evil or rouge fighters you get 1 alignment point for every 10 fighters YOU LOSE fighting. It doesn't matter how many fighters you kill,  only how many you lost.  A player in a ColTran will get a lot more out of 100 enemy fighters than someone in a Battle Ship.  But at cr 180 per fighter,  that's 1800 per alignment point,  and if you're doing the Corp Disband/Rogue fighter thing, double this since you supply the fighters on both sides.