...

Hostile S+M ships tend to arrive via highways or super highways, whilst L and XL targets boost in. All hostiles are hell-bent on attacking the station so best arrive ASAP or you risk missing the action. As of v4.0, the payment is separated into a base reward and a bonus payment in order to minimise the affect of letting stations do all the killing.

With Xenon station defence missions the difficulty is an extremely rough approximation. On normal difficulty there is almost always at least 1 K L fighter and 3 P M fighters independent on mission difficulty. Higher difficulty missions can have anywhere from 2 K L fighters to 16 P M fighters. It is worth noting that the fighter wing spawns are extremely biased towards P M fighters, which are the toughest M fighter and deal shield penetrating damage. Unless the player brings along at least 2 to 3 XL fighter ships it is recommended that the K L fighters be left to the station defenses.

Patrol Missions

This is similar to a chain of station defence missions in that you'll visit multiple zones and the various hostiles that may appear need killing. As with station defence missions, the payment is now separated into a base reward and a bonus payment.

...