I wonder if sparing the militia in Troy for Taylor2 keeps them + confed friendly in late game.

If so afterburning to Hector might be quicker than murdering the police then spending the rest of the mid-late game begging them to leave you alone. Anyone tried this?

It'll only help keeping them friendly until Palan, and that'll depend on how many extra Pirate and Retro kills you pick up along the way. You can check how kills affect reputation in this thread https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/privateer-rf-reputation.25908/

But in summary, Militia Talons affect your reputation with the Militia/Confed the same as killing Hunters. You're going to have to kill at least 18 Hunters in Palan, so hostility with the Militia/Confed is pretty much unavoidable, but if you pick up enough Pirates and Retros then the 6 Demons you kill in Oxford won't be enough to make them hostile.

The confeds/militia are usually non-hostile for me during the trip to Basra anyway. Just to put some numbers on this...

Once we're done with Oxford, we've lost 50 reputation points with confed/militia for killing "good guy" ships (3 militia Talons, 1 Galaxy, 6 Demons, all worth -5 each). But we also gained 10 (5 pirates, 5 retros) at Oxford, so we only need 15 more to get to -25, which will make confed/militia barely neutral. And I normally have about that many retro kills.

If we're a little bit short on retro kills then it could be worth popping a pirate or two, but it has to be in a situation where this costs almost zero time, because it only helps us during the brief period before we start massacring hunters for Lynn Murphy. I think the Black Rhombus mission is the only reasonable place to do this.

(As an aside, I think it's hilarious that you can avoid killing anyone while working for a pirate queen and a mob boss, but doing jobs for a university library forces you to get blood on your hands.)