Premature weapons discharge fine.

[Darty]

This suggestion is simple. When you open fire on a wanted target before your scan finishes you currently get an assault bounty. This can be rather annoying, especially for mining and trading ships who are often the target of piracy. You end up being threatened by a pirate and when you try to open fire first you get wanted because you didn't wait for the scanner to finish scanning them. Now you are locked out of the entire system and kill on site for all cops. Because you shot at someone trying to rob you.

Instead of this, if you open fire on an unscanned ship and that ship IS wanted, instead of getting an assault bounty you would get a "Premature weapons discharge" fine. Fine's are a lot easier to deal with, so while the fine will still be an inconvenience, it isn't overly punishing for an understandable mistake. If the ship isn't wanted you still get an assault bounty.

 

[antigravpilot]

I think this is an excellent change and is very much needed, especially for new players, the only issue being that a fine of this sort would give away if a target is actually wanted or not. There have been instances where I've shot at a target before a scan finished and it turned out to be clean. Such happenings were far apart from one another when I was less careful about these things, but they did happen.

If it did get implemented, I'd expect it to be applied when firing on all unscanned targetted ships, up until a certain threshold was passed.

 

[bicarbon8]

sounds like a great suggestion and makes much more sense given the target IS wanted anyway. This could also allow you to open fire straight away after an interdiction in many cases because you'd have already scanned the target ship while in supercruise (not guaranteed they'll still be wanted when you drop, but most of the time they will)

 

[Para Handy]

This suggestion is simple. ..........

Remove Assault bounties and make it all fines if they are pirate scum.

Basically this is what you are saying. Saying an assault bounty is changed to a fine if the victim of your assault is actually wanted.

Don't know if this would wash - on the fence.