Saving Mr and Misses NPC?

[Martian Successor]

Ok, so a couple days ago while cruising along in my finely tuned Adder I came across a distress beacon while exploring the Shudun system, wondering if I'll discover any planets. I pulled out of super cruise at the beacon and there was an NPC in a Diamondback Explorer. He asked for help and said that he's run out of fuel. Now I don't carry a fuel transfer module so I did something else instead. I opened up my cargo bay with the logic being that he could seal his suit and go EVA so I can pick him up and get him to the nearest station - thus saving his life rather than leaving him stranded. Of course that didn't happen and I had to just leave the poor guy to his fate. My 2 questions are:

1) Is there any way to help these guys and gals other than to call the Fuel Rats (who will probably be busy saving human players)?

2) Will there be a future update where you can offer to pick up just the pilots of the stranded vessel or tell the next station you land on to rescue that person?

Remember folks: just because they're called NPCs doesn't mean they are "Non-People".

 

[Deleted member 38366]

I had similar thoughts.

When I encountered the Fuel emergency scenario for the fist time, this is what I expected :

1) NPC takes note of my presence (which it doesn't, keeps texting like he's all lone)

2) As no ordinary Ship has Fuel transfer Limpets, the only way for the rescue to work would be for this guy to
a) recognize my presence
b) issue me a rescue mission (with time limit)
c) become persistent after accepting the Mission

Only this way, I could retrofit my ship at the nearest location (or hop into a dedicated Ship), return to his position and actually rescue the guy.

Being a non-persistent Signal Source really doesn't help this scenario.
And being the same Signal Source type like the severe attack scenario doesn't help either... I'd never venture into a Distress Call when not in a Combat Ship (which also commonly doesn't carry Fuel Limpets btw.).

Lots of work needed to flesh out these things...

 

[Martian Successor]

I had similar thoughts.

When I encountered the Fuel emergency scenario for the fist time, this is what I expected :

1) NPC takes note of my presence (which it doesn't, keeps texting like he's all lone)

2) As no ordinary Ship has Fuel transfer Limpets, the only way for the rescue to work would be for this guy to
a) recognize my presence
b) issue me a rescue mission (with time limit)
c) become persistent after accepting the Mission

Only this way, I could retrofit my ship at the nearest location (or hop into a dedicated Ship), return to his position and actually rescue the guy.

Being a non-persistent Signal Source really doesn't help this scenario.
And being the same Signal Source type like the severe attack scenario doesn't help either... I'd never venture into a Distress Call when not in a Combat Ship (which also commonly doesn't carry Fuel Limpets btw.).

Lots of work needed to flesh out these things...

It'd be great if this feature was fleshed out more like you say. Currently it feels very bare bones but with potential.

And yeah, no shizzle-biscuits about Distress Calls being super dangerous, ha!
I'm still kind of new to how everything works in the game and so when I got bored looking for frustratingly non-existent planets in that system I started visiting Distress Calls. The Distress Call I stopped at after the guy with the fuel troubles spelled my doom! 5 Diamondback Explorers vs my Adder. Tried to run but they tore me apart - mostly because I didn't expect to encounter such heavy opposition and was trying to initiate super cruise while my hard points were out. By the time I retracted them it was too late

This game likes to punish inquisitiveness and boredom, which can be disheartening, but there's also lots of potential for some fun improvements imo. Chief among them a better tutorial and way more helpful mission explanations.

 

[insanephoton]

I did once manage to save one of these out of fuel NPCs but only because I had the necessary equipment fitted on the off chance. I'd taken a mission 3 days to kill 39 pirates in a certain system. Since there weren't any RES sites and the Nav beacon wasn't really working out, I was hitting the distress signals quite a bit. Doing distress calls opened my eyes to the effectiveness of hull reinforcement packages