Here's an idea.
Instead of simply killing ships, let players/NPC pirates capture ships.
Thoughts:
- Chances are that you'll want to disable the enemies drive, but include the ability to damage the crew life support system, such that they all eject, including the ship of a player. Let's make that crew life support unit quite tough, such that the police might well be able to respond to a distress call
- Post ejection of the crew, the ship is considered dead in the water
- Introduce a new drone to attach a tether to a disabled ship. Let's oblige a player to attach say 1 tether per 500 tons of the mass of the ship to be salvaged, and that it takes a little while to attach each
- A ship can tow say twice it's cargo weight in both supercruise and full jumps. Clearly on a jump the ships jump range will be vastly reduced
- A ship salved can be sold for say half of it's value, minus damage inflicted during the combat if sold to a respectable shipyard
- A ship can be sold on the blackmarket for 1/4 of it's value, minus damage inflicted
- If a ship is too big, (e.g. a Conda or Clipper), it can be chopped up in space using mining lasers, into say 100 ton chunks, allowing salvage of bigger ships. Clearly that will have inflicted more damage to the ship, to ships salvaged this way are worth only say 1/10th of their original value (1/20th on the black market).
In short, it could be a serious money maker, but would NOT be easy to genuine, make money from. With the requirements for being able to fully disable an enemy ship, chop it up using mining lasers, tether it and tow it, you'd probably want a wing to be effective.
The multipliers are just some initial ideas. Clearly these parameters should be tweaked to ensure that this isn't a game changing mechanic.
As a pre-requisite for the above, I believe that we have the following re-requisites:
- A super-power wide bounty system, to replace the existing "in system" one. Sure, a pirate can still be based in an anarchy system, but being wanted across all of Federation space suddenly becomes bad news
- That police will actually try to DEAL with wanted criminals in policed space
Instead of simply killing ships, let players/NPC pirates capture ships.
Thoughts:
- Chances are that you'll want to disable the enemies drive, but include the ability to damage the crew life support system, such that they all eject, including the ship of a player. Let's make that crew life support unit quite tough, such that the police might well be able to respond to a distress call
- Post ejection of the crew, the ship is considered dead in the water
- Introduce a new drone to attach a tether to a disabled ship. Let's oblige a player to attach say 1 tether per 500 tons of the mass of the ship to be salvaged, and that it takes a little while to attach each
- A ship can tow say twice it's cargo weight in both supercruise and full jumps. Clearly on a jump the ships jump range will be vastly reduced
- A ship salved can be sold for say half of it's value, minus damage inflicted during the combat if sold to a respectable shipyard
- A ship can be sold on the blackmarket for 1/4 of it's value, minus damage inflicted
- If a ship is too big, (e.g. a Conda or Clipper), it can be chopped up in space using mining lasers, into say 100 ton chunks, allowing salvage of bigger ships. Clearly that will have inflicted more damage to the ship, to ships salvaged this way are worth only say 1/10th of their original value (1/20th on the black market).
In short, it could be a serious money maker, but would NOT be easy to genuine, make money from. With the requirements for being able to fully disable an enemy ship, chop it up using mining lasers, tether it and tow it, you'd probably want a wing to be effective.
The multipliers are just some initial ideas. Clearly these parameters should be tweaked to ensure that this isn't a game changing mechanic.
As a pre-requisite for the above, I believe that we have the following re-requisites:
- A super-power wide bounty system, to replace the existing "in system" one. Sure, a pirate can still be based in an anarchy system, but being wanted across all of Federation space suddenly becomes bad news
- That police will actually try to DEAL with wanted criminals in policed space
Last edited: