- Instant respawn after ship destruction, instant death penalty for poor parking. Everyone Wanted Dead.
Because all the pilots are CLONES!
Each time you enter a station, you back up your body and mind. When your ship blows, your current copy dies. No ejection. Your in-game character loses all the experience collected since the last mind backup (docking). That is why you lose bounties, exploration data, combat bonds etc not cashed. They were not added to your backup. So when your copy dies, your ship sends a high speed signal out, initiating the wake up of your next clone.
This is the reason life is so cheap (6k for murder) and death penalty is practically the only punishment type.
Sometimes the cloning process go wrong. Resulting a clone with imperfect mind-body integration. Those clones turn violent, destructive and homicidal. The bounty system is out there to deactivate these malfunctioning clones. This allows the creation of a new, hopefully correct, clone. Sometimes the clone is so corrupted, simple re-cloning would not help, hence the sleeping bounty system. Police and Bounty hunters are not there to apprehend anyone. They are there to check the clone works correctly. If not, make sure you get a new one...
- Instant cargo load/unload. No Station-Planet flights. Stock, more than a base could fit. Tech wanted ship cargo transfer. 1t slave canisters.
It all happens because of Transporter beams
The cargo is being unloaded/loaded using transporter beams. The same beams are used to move stuff between the planet surface and the station it orbits. The same transporter is used by the tech wanted ships. This transporter beam is just too expensive for CMDRs and/or too bulky/energy consuming for anything but capital ships and stations.
Each cargo rack is fitted with a passive pad. The base or tech ships have an active pad that locks on and do the transfer. In this setup, the transfer range is around 100m most. For planet-base transfer, you need 2 active pads. Small ships would still need to land on a planet. It is a bulk matter transporter. Living things (like slaves) would need to be in stasis and inside a special protective capsule that weight around 1 ton loaded.
- No access to the current prices of other bases. Message transfer missions, tangible data canisters.
Radio is still not faster than light
There is no way to transmit on-line bulk data over interplanetary, let alone interstellar distances. You need an actual ship and FSD to travel faster than light. Data in itself can't do it. You can't ask an other station to send you their prices, it would take years to get there over radio. There is an FTL communication method, but it has an extremely limited bandwidth. GalNet, KWS scanners and automated distress beacons can use it to send and receive 1-2 byte worth of data. Like the world before wired and wireless communication. That is why you have ships loaded with data canisters, can't send your exp data, can't compare station prices on-line etc.
- The Freewinder, crappy AI, overly hostile AI, colonized bubble.
People lost interest in space travel and exploration. They simply don't care about that anymore. It is as boring, dull and just not overly comfortable. There is a HUGE shortage of people want to travel in space, let alone pilot a space ship. So the governments try everything possible to get someone out there. They even give ships away completely free as an advertisement. If that brings in one more space trucker, it totally worth it. However, because of this shortage, there is absolutely no screening. That is one reason there are so many lunatics and stupid pilots out there.
