Hostages and the Brig

[Ktonos]

General idea is that hostages might be captured from vessels transporting them. So,

1) Slaves, passengers and VIPs all should be in escape pods rather than cargo canisters.
2) You could grab and stash an escape pod in your cargo, but each pod would have a life support timer, which when expires, the hostage dies.
3) You can have the option to transfer a hostage from an escape pod to a passenger cabin, in order to lift the expiration barrier of the escape pod's life support
4) And here comes the introduction of the new module...the Brig. A passenger cabin of sorts, but of the lowest kind. So a Brig of the same class as an Economy cabin can fit much more "passengers", but of course you wouldn't have many requests in the passenger lounge (maybe prisoners of war, refugees etc) so its main use would be that of transporting hostages.

5) Hostages can be sold in the Black Market (they have the connections to make the most out of them), and if in a black market in the home faction of a Vip , the gain would be considerably boosted.

I think that all sorts of new things could open up with randomly found "occupied escape pods" and new mission types, while at the same time luxury vessels make a valid target too.

 

[MK Regular]

Some good ideas here, but I'm going to add a few of my thoughts on this:

1) Escape pods are designed to put their occupant into stasis, meaning that the occupant is not conscious and is not really using life support. Also, escape pods are designed to keep their occupants safe for relatively long periods of time. I would say that having a life support timer doesn't make a lot of sense here, so there would need to be another reason to load hostages into the brig, which I will address in my next thought.

2) The brig should be differentiated from the economy cabin by making the brig an F-rated cabin (economy is E). This would serve to increase the brig's 'passenger' capacity, while also bringing the purchase price down. The brig should not be usable for passenger missions (except maybe prisoner transport) and should not have any escape pods. This of course, begs the question 'why would someone use a brig instead of an economy cabin?' Simple: remember how the brig has a higher 'passenger capacity? It would have a higher capacity than a same size cargo rack (say 25% more), meaning that you can carry MORE hostages if you load them into the brig. Of course, this would need to be balanced (give the brig higher mass, blame it on reinforcing holding cells or something).

3) What about rescuing hostages? If hostages are in the brig, they don't have an escape pod, and are dependent upon the ship's life support. If they had an escape pod, a hatch breaker would be more than enough to get them out of ship alive and they could be rescued relatively easily. However, since they do not have an escape pod (and are not 'cargo') this will no longer work, since they cannot be rescued with a hatch breaker, and even if they could, you can't rescue them when they are dead. What would be needed is something along the lines of a rescue limpet. A rescue limpet would behave much like a hatch breaker, except it would only work on passengers. It would jettison a few randomly selected passengers in 'rescue pods', which could then be picked up as cargo/passengers. Rescue limpets could be used for both actually rescuing people and kidnapping people.

Any thoughts feedback are welcome.