This has been my recent experience. I have a Master/Insane battle rep running 200 scan or so and my BT is always full of other Insane rep players. I left my legion to do some recruiting, and while I had no legion, it seemed to be full of players with much weaker battle reps I have never encountered before, players in small legions or no legions themselves. It was such a drastic change that it could not be a mere coincidence, yet I have never seen this mentioned anywhere before. I will try this again soon to verify my findings.

Interesting.

I found the same thing the first time I left a legion to join its training legion - I think I was around rank 50 then, and my BT went from having 8-9 ships with high defense and hull (all savage/insane rep) to having almost all very weak, legionless/single-legion ships.

I switched legions this week again (rank 65) and found that none of the ships on my battle tab changed - still all savage/insane. I'm not sure if it has to do with how much time I spent out of a legion (I was out for quite a few days the first time, and only a few minutes this time) or if it's just luck.

part of its based on how much scan your running. less scan=weaker and lower ranked ships usually.

Scan was the same. Only difference was I left a large legion.

idk, i noticed that i get lower ranked players with less scan. maybe that was just a coincidence?

I can confirm this... I went a few times called "legion-less red badge run". The thing about it is that they can't be bump, they will stay there no matter what until disabled. They can also reappear after disabled (watch out for a double disable, legion alert warning). I've tried this at rank 125 with 1.3k+ PvP Kills, I'm now at Rank 201 with 3.1k PvP Kills. In my opinion and from experiences with the legion-less BT run, I would suggest not to do it. It's not worth losing your loyalty for some Reds. Back then I was obsessed with Red badges, now at Rank 201+ it's all about NPCs.
EDIT: I've only tried this tactic at Rank 125, 129, 132 and stopped due to players unavailable to be bump even the ones with Halc Trap. Gained about 250-350~ PvP kills.

Yes! Someone else has found the PvP secret of the galaxy. I'm out of legion again, doing some testing and getting strange results out of the BT. Is acting very strange, It will change really fast most of the time. Normally it seems 1 hit will clear a player of the tab right? I hit a guy a few times and refreshed by accident, and he was still there when it reloaded. So today it was a "legion-less blue badge run" and I used up all my TMs and the players kept refreshing for me. Definately something to try if you're solo for a while!

One negative thing I found on this legion-less badge run is that the halc'd players or players in general aren't able to be bumped off of the BT until disabled. Other than that I think it's another thing you can do while you're doing "Lone Conqueror" Medal.

hmm maybe thats why people go solo sometimes.

Could also be why a guy like senatorhung can rack up raids so easy in his own small legion.

Senator has a large crew size and access to a ton of TMs. thats another reason why he's good at raiding.

I know that Not trying to discredit what he does he's built his ship for raids specifically, and he's GOOD at it. Just trying to think of an example where someone could use this anomaly to their advantage.

Edit. Double posted for some reason

lol don't worry, i was just saying in general that senator's crew size also helps.

sadly, the anomaly only holds when you are not in a legion. even with only 6 members (had to punt 2 today for inactivity), as soon as you are in a legion, you get the same BT behaviour as everyone else in a legion, regardless of size. the only thing i can do is to shuffle around my scan mods. i've also started burning my scan buff artis to improve my pool of BT targets.

as for burning TMs, i had gotten over 1k hacks before i started working on raids so i had a pile of dark pyramids on hand for the most recent bi-weekly mission. trading those for TMs ... well, those were salad days. before that i had been selling TMs - looking back thru my records, i was still selling TMs as of 08jun. by 02jul, i was trading for TMs instead, so i had over 1k raids before i began to use TMs.

also, please keep in mind that as long as my raid targets leave my badge message on their comms, that i leave them alone for the rest of the week - my TM usage is when i have multiple raid bogies and i have to beat the forced server refresh. i don't use TMs for hacks as successful hacks do not remove the target from the BT.

omnipotence (r106) and LOWLAND (r692) are still both outpacing me in the charge up to 5000 raids, so i'm not using any secret formula. there are just more fish to target at my level my crew / rank ratio is currently 14.57.

Ok yes I see what you mean Senatorhung. I'm in a small legion temporarily and battle tab is back to having 10 insane rep players on it, most ranked well above me. Also- 14.57?? I consider myself a bit of a slow ranker but I'm only at 4.3. J do dump most of my rank points into decks though at this stage of the game.

Okay, I was out of my legion on a trade, and have just left. I'm already finding some serious issues. 3 people already have halcs tripped, and another 3 people can no longer be killed (disable counter down to 0). I am also seeing that about 2 of the people remained on my BT from while I was still in a legion, but that may be caused by my somewhat low rank.

Just confirming it

found this glitch is invading IN legion combat as well... just found barkworrier on my BT and hes totally zeroed. i can throw a cm at him, but cant bump him..WTF!!!