Should one stray shot be a death sentence?

[SirDavros]

To be honest, I quite like that a simple accident can lead to me having a bounty on me or, as was the case in the past week, have the Alliance after me for a few days. Since it first happened to me (and I wasn't initially aware that I'd even done it!) I've become much more careful.

For instance, I dropped into to take out a wing of NPCs last night, only to find my new Alliance friends mooching about. They kept getting in my line of sight and it made me much more careful about when I hit the trigger. It's irritating, sure, but makes me take much more notice of where I'm shooting my damned lasers and torpedoes

 

[Geist]

It's something I put up with though I dislike it. It can be too easy to accidentally shoot an authority vessel. It would be better to have a, I dunno, three strikes and you are out type of system. Perhaps a sort of "Cease fire and retract your weapons - you have 20 seconds to comply" even.

The fact that for one tiny ding a whole pack of authority vessels turn on you like a pack of piranhas. If I actually target and then fire on an authority vessel or clean ship then fair enough, that is my bad for not being careful enough and I expect to have to run.

Suppose it is just one of those little imbalances we have to put up with.

 

[Oaktree]

To me its more the cops response that feels akward:
So cops are trying to take down an Anaconda with 200.000 credits bounty. A dangerous fellow who's attacking shiping lanes and needs to be taken care of. I'm helping them and suddenly i make a mistake and i strayshoot a cop. It´s not that i dont deserve a small bounty for being careless, it's that the cops suddenly completely ignore the evil Anaconda and start all ganking on me.

It would look more real, if they would only start ganking all on me if i kept strayshooting them and my bounty was increasing accordingly. There should be a threshold, like between 1000-2000 credits bounty, before they all become aggressive.

 

[andrewg_oz]

Thanks for all the replies.

I'll maintain my view that I did nothing stupid and practiced "trigger discipline". I don't believe anyone could have avoided hitting the NPC in the same circumstances.

In light of the fact that NPCs are stupid and will happily drift into the line of fire, my suggestion is this:

Damage that currently results in a 200cr bounty results in a fine for assault instead, with a cool-off period of 1-2sec before another offense can occur so that you have enough time to release the trigger or for that NPC to fly right in front of your ship, into and out of your line of fire.

If you then commit another 200cr assault with that prior assault still in your transactions, then you get a bounty, and the NPCs can pile on.

It means that if you screw up, you don't get ganked by NPCs and you really do need to leave the combat and pay off that fine before returning. If you kill someone with a stray shot, then that is more than the 200cr offense and you should get a bounty straight away.

Right now I have to consider if the risk of a stray shot costing me 2-3 nights of playtime is really worth it, and right now it's not, so I'm back to grinding engineers...

 

[Paineframe]

There's no "three-strikes" rule when you shoot a civilian NPC. Why should cops be more lenient about being shot at than civilians?

 

[Oaktree]

There's no "three-strikes" rule when you shoot a civilian NPC. Why should cops be more lenient about being shot at than civilians?

I'm strayshot by cops all the time in RES and they are imune to bountys! Im a civilian too helping them!
They could be more lenient because im helping them and we're all engaged in a fireball with lasers and projectiles everywhere.
But i admit that if i became more and more careless i deserve a swift response. There should be a limit before they take action. Not immediately consider you nº1 wanted after 1 or 2 strayshots.

 

[Iain L]

Or consider if the risk of a stray shot costs you 2-3 nights of playtime is really worth it, and right now it's not, so you fly a cheaper ship. After a few rebuy screens I learned to strip expensive components that I didn't really need off my shooty-bang-bang ships.

 

[AJH16]

This is why you need to watch your sensors. Unless you are fighting right on top of the drop point, ships won't "simply appear in front of you". You'll see them coming in on sensors and can avoid them. Would I complain if they made it a little less aggressive for what is obviously a friendly fire incident, no I wouldn't, but at the same time, it isn't that bad. Generally other bounty hunters won't turn on you until the current target is down, so you normally have time to get away.

The one thing that is seriously annoying is when you nick a ship with one shot and then they get destroyed and you get the full murder charge. That's pretty broken.

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

I've buzzed a few friendly NPCs on accident before, both with beams and multis. In CZs, sometimes you'll get the 'Watch your fire!" dialogue, but they never became hostile. I've even accidentally targeted a friendly and fired on them, but stopped before they turned on me.

I think there's a certain damage threshold that must be met before they attack you. Since I began using twin PAs on everything, I've been seeing more signatures go from green to red lol.

I just wanna take this time to apologize to all of those NPCs who have their shields accidentally obliterated by me lol.

 

[kdjac]

What grinds my gears is when I get shot by the police or whatever and nothing happens them?

 

[JetsonRING]

What grinds my gears is when I get shot by the police or whatever and nothing happens them?

Or some poindexter drives into my ship from behind or underneath (I am the larger ship and restricted in my ability to see and maneuver) and I get the fine . . .

 

[Julio Montega]

There are engineered multi-cannons with smart rounds,
self destructing before hitting friendlies.
If you are having issues with hitting friendlies give 'em a try.

 

[vernonator]

This has been broken for a long time - its stupid, and infuriating (and the fanboi's will say its all your fault).

 

[Devari]

I know it's called "Eliteangerous", but this is just ridiculous.

If it makes you feel any better, a good way to "tag" NPCs or maintain fire when there are a lot of system security ships around is to use turrets. When set to "target only" they never generate bounties, even if an NPC flies through them. When I see my target is obscured I stop firing with my multicannons and just use turrets. Even if the NPC uses chaff and your turrets are wildly inaccurate it still won't accidentally generate a bounty, FD has "hardwired" turrets to be bounty-proof in "target only" mode.

One of these words is not like the other

Not to bring too much "science" into the discussion, but it is very possible to have a "blast" without any sound, especially in space. Using a decompression or explosive effect to blast a door or hatch off of a ship in space would either be very quite or even silent with no medium to transmit the sound depending on how far away you are from the blast. There could of course be some sound transmitted through the ship's hull or to the pressurized compartments within the ship being damaged but generally speaking space explosions can be extremely destructive with no sound involved. So you most certainly can be "quietly blasting" away in RES.

 

[Dbrn47]

I dont believe it should. I also dont believe I should lose my Python to a persistent Deadly Engineered NPC over a 10k bounty that I have either. Some sort of progressive escalation would be neat. As your bounty increases you begin to see more and higher skilled NPCs trying to take you... all the way up to wings of Elite bounty hunters. It would have to be in proper proportions of course. No wings of Elite Corvettes coming for my 50k bounty.

 

[AJH16]

Not to bring too much "science" into the discussion, but it is very possible to have a "blast" without any sound, especially in space. Using a decompression or explosive effect to blast a door or hatch off of a ship in space would either be very quite or even silent with no medium to transmit the sound depending on how far away you are from the blast. There could of course be some sound transmitted through the ship's hull or to the pressurized compartments within the ship being damaged but generally speaking space explosions can be extremely destructive with no sound involved. So you most certainly can be "quietly blasting" away in RES.

Ok, so we're drifting off topic, but since a blast wave is a compression wave, it IS the sound isn't it? Without the compression wave all you have is explosively accelerated projectiles, not a blast, unless my understanding of explosive physics is off quite a bit.

 

[Devari]

Ok, so we're drifting off topic, but since a blast wave is a compression wave, it IS the sound. Without the compression wave all you have is explosively accelerated projectiles, not a blast.

The explosive itself, and any shrapnel or outer casing around the explosive, is sufficient to generate what is commonly referred to as a blast. There is no medium to transfer a shock wave beyond the immediate effects of the explosion but it would still be considered a "blast" in combat as well as in a general sense. If I were firing missiles at your ship the explosions would be damaging the hull with the effect of the explosive and Elite considers this distinct from both "thermal" or "kinetic" damage as it is typed in the game as "explosive" damage which is sort of a combination of both of these at the same time.

 

[AJH16]

The explosive itself, and any shrapnel or outer casing around the explosive, is sufficient to generate what is commonly referred to as a blast. There is no medium to transfer a shock wave beyond the immediate effects of the explosion but it would still be considered a "blast" in combat as well as in a general sense. If I were firing missiles at your ship the explosions would be damaging the hull with the effect of the explosive and Elite considers this distinct from both "thermal" or "kinetic" damage as it is typed in the game as "explosive" damage which is sort of a combination of both of these at the same time.

Yes, my point is that it isn't actually a blast. It's explosive acceleration. The blast abates rapidly without medium to transmit it but not before the explosive acceleration which still sends out pretty damaging projectile scatter, but there isn't going to be a blast/pressure wave beyond a fairly short distance. It's still arguably distinct from kinetic due to the nature of the spread of the damage and explosive is certainly still accurate.

I suppose you can make the argument of a general usage of the term "blast" as a synonym for explosion, but original statement could also be considered accurate in the scientific sense since a blast wave can't propagate in a vacuum if you want to be "scientific" rather than "colloquial".

 

[IndigoWyrd]

The standard responses to this are "git gud" and "trigger control", and in the first instance, trigger control is a valid response.
In the second however...
Having been there, done that, more than once.. it is an aggravation to say the least. No *I* didn't target that ship, *I* didn't use it as a shield, it got in my way... but to the law of ED this does not matter, and so I've simply come to accept this as an occupational hazard.
It would not be all that different than being in an active combat zone where civilians are present and shooting one of them because they ran through the middle of a firefight - with the exception that your own troops are unlikely to turn and fire on you, but would very likely have a few things to say after the battle was over. As would your CO, as would quite a few others to be sure.

So perhaps the better way to handle this would be some simple NPC 'fact checking'.
Is PlayerBounty > CurrentTargetBounty?
If no, then ignore player.
If yes, Is PlayerBounty < 1000 cr?
If no, Are their Other Targets?
If yes, ignore player.
If no, then target player.

This would go light years toward improving this matter for everyone.

 

[clinton]

Can't understand why this hasn't been fixed when the fix is simple: require bounties to be a minimum of 6000 Cr. So if you murder someone you're going to get the cops after you but accidental assaults only cause bounties if they're done repeatedly.