Smuggling on trade-lanes with a cloaking device is deservedly penalized.
Smuggling should not be entirely risk free on a lawful or quasi-lawful ID. Cloaking in a trade lane, under the old system, was as risk free as you could possibly get.
Smuggling should be the most profitable and optimized for Unlawful smugglers, who take on the most risk, and who most clearly telegraph encounters with lawfuls, and other, hostile unlawfuls. Quasi-lawfuls trade profit for plausible deniability.
If you want to smuggle, you should ideally be:
Smuggling off the trade lane (unless the area of space you are in is thoroughly dead, or you need to get away in a hurry and don't have any other options), and abstaining from flying in a hyperdirect line from A to B. There are other ways to avoid interception apart from using a cloaking device (which, under the old system, was an encounter evasion device).
Further, as a smuggler, I used to have the rather questionable experience of lawful battlecruisers de-cloaking upon smuggling convoys. A battlecruiser with a cloak was the optimal smuggler interception vessel, rather than, say, a few snubs. That didn't leave the smugglers with much recourse, did it? The current system gives far more time to react.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)
![[Image: XTF1d6x.png]](https://i.imgur.com/XTF1d6x.png)