Thanks for all the replies and thoughts.
It is sad that the only "free the slaves" that have been in the game are those very rare (and not apparently no longer existing) missions that asked you to go deliver some slaves, so that they could "free" them. There has never been an option to simply "free them", or to hand them over to somebody.
I do vaguely remember a community goal along those lines - but I had it in my mind it was to obtain slaves and hand them over to the Empire for reprocessing into Imperial slaves (for the record, as a dirty basker I have occasionally transported Imperial slaves; almost as many times as I've been round the debate about whether the Empire just makes trouble for itself by choosing to call its system 'slavery' when it seems to only
barely qualify).
1. While life as a slave is typically nasty, brutish and short, it is still life - with the (admittedly slim) possibility of less-than-severe treatment by a future owner and eventual release in the future. This is surely better than death - after all, if the slave had thought death a better option than slavery, they could presumably have committed suicide prior to being snap-frozen in the canister.
You make that sound like
such an easy option. The survival instinct's powerful, and very, very hard to overcome. Not impossible, obviously, but certainly not easy either.
2. A slave in a cargo pod is not awake and aware - they are in cryosleep. A cargo pod requires minimal power to keep the slave in that state, so if you simply fly away, they can survive more or less indefinitely, until someone eventually wakes them up. {Yes, I know that ejected canisters in-game have a self-destruct timer on them in-game; I am choosing to ignore that this exists as it only exists for "game reasons". Canisters that you find free-floating have no such timer.}
That's reasonable. It is, as you say, only a mechanic to create artificial challenge (something that could sum up half the mechanics in ED, if we're honest with ourselves). Pretend you've tagged them and the authorities will be along in due course to pick them up. And then head-canon some reason as to why you couldn't have done it yourself.
3. If/when a slave pod eventually runs out of power (perhaps after a few years in space), their end is not painful - they simply never wake up. So shooting them (or, for the more squeamish, "accidentally" ramming them until they explode) is no more "merciful" than simply leaving them be.
One hopes. Presuming the suspension system doesn't fail before the canister integrity does. But best not to think about that, perhaps.
People used to have a similar discussion to this one, about "what to do with escape pods I've found out in space". Jettisoning them inside a spaceport seemed to be the only humane option to rescue people. Then FD added the "Search and Rescue" contact at certain starports, allowing us to properly "rescue" people and even be rewarded for it. I would prefer to see "free slaves" as a S&R option at starports where slavery is illegal.
I guess they could put slaves into the search and rescue list for a token reward so you can't really profit from slave liberation.
That would certainly seem to be the most obvious way to get around it. I do understand that 'immurshun' is the stuff of mockery and contempt, but for those of us cursed with the sort of brain that likes to make stories for our characters it can be jarring to come across situations like this. My character certainly isn't squeaky-clean: she's an Imperial and, as above, she's reasonably cool with Imperial slavery because of its social function and its safeguards - as the lore says, it works more as a social safety net than what I think of as 'true' slavery. But 'true' slaves need to be freed, and it's odd, in a way, that the game creates this distinction between the two types of slavery (one
actual slavery, one kind of not), yet doesn't explore that distinction to any great extent.
Catch 22? Whatever you do it's going to end bad. Cases like this show how shallow C&P is. Great opportunities for gameplay ruled out due to strict policies. Loitering is a crime punishable by death. But that applies to CMDRs only. There can be large debris field that threatens all space traffic and no one cares. One good heart tries to clean it up - bam! Illicit cargo, fines and bounties. This is how you kill the space community. Next time someone's stranded and calling for help? Pfft. GL mate, ain;t got time for clearing criminal record for saving you.
Remember - every good deed will be punished accordingly.
'Loitering punishable by death' is an absolutely ridiculous fudge. Mandatory tow out of the station with an attendant hefty fine would be more logical and perfectly consistent with the spirit of things: either instant tow, or a real-time tow the player has to sit through, making the tow out easily as inconvenient - and thus worth avoiding - as having to deal with a death and rebuy screen.
Shame you can't mark the coordinates for the rescue ships.
The game wouldn't even have to create those rescue ships. Hell, just a message on screen saying, "Thanks, Commander; the pickup crew will be along with twenty-four hours" would do.
I've become rather unmoved by the various descriptors used in game. I mean, slaves, narcotics, illegal goods, legal goods... it all boils down to "is picking it up worth the time in credits". There's no in-game CMDR soul representation, so do what you will. It seems that EDs universe is just as uncaring, so I find it rather fitting.
There's a lot to be said for that, I agree. On the other hand, the fact that ED's universe is vast and harsh should - at the risk of making myself look like what EVE Online calls a carebear - encourage
more focus on the 'soul' (in terms of our approach to life and meaning and all that stuff). Because in this endless, brutal darkness, in this brief flash of time before our species and everything we knew and built and loved vanishes forever, what else do we really have that makes us Human?
