Cargo manifests! (Smuggling, data running, illegal mining, improved black markets.)
So, at the moment, it's kind of ambiguous what cargo is considered “stolen” or not. I find a cargo canister floating out in deep space. Am I a criminal for picking it up? Well, yes, apparently, but I don't understand why, and there's no real in-game logic for it.
I'd like to propose a simple system to make it easy to understand what cargo is legal or not.
Basically, every ship has a “cargo manifest.” If you acquire cargo by legal means, a manifest for it is added to your ship. So if I go to the commodities market, I can buy 1 unit of Biowaste, and I get 1 Biowaste manifest automatically. Manifests are non-transferable in space. (Or maybe they are, but both ships need special equipment to do it. This is to prevent pirates from just blackmailing people into giving up the manifest, too.)
To sell a unit of cargo at the commodities market, I need to have both the cargo, and the manifest. (Which is removed when I make the sale.) If I have no manifest, I can only sell the goods on the black market.
When you are subject to stop and scans, any cargo you don't have a manifest for is presumed illegal, and you'll get attacked for smuggling / piracy.
Basically, the outcome is the same as we have now, but it's more explicit – if I find cargo floating around, I know that I won't have the manifest for it, and it'll be illegal.
What the system would add, however, is opportunities for more interesting gameplay with some fairly cheap additional features added:
We could let you buy cheaper cargo *without* manifests from the black market. This would open up smuggling gameplay. I could intentionally run illegal goods at a slightly higher profit margin. (Since I wouldn't be paying officials at the commodities market a cut.) Maybe anarchist stations and pirate bases don't *have* a commodities market.
You could have information broker contacts on stations that buy / sell, or forge manifests. This would allow pirates with good connections to bump up their profit margins slightly, paying a contact to let them sell stolen goods at a higher rate. (The expected result of this would be to drive up the cost of blackmarket goods in a station and drive down the cost of legal goods, until the difference is the same as the cost of the forgery / manifest: if it was profitable to use a forged / stolen manifest in the same place you got it from, the forger would do it himself.)
You could attach factions to the manifests, and factions wouldn't recognize manifests from their enemies. Maybe the Federals decide to blockade Eranin, and will try to stop and confiscate any outgoing cargo with Eranin manifests?
The cost of acquiring manifests would be part of the difference in sell/buy prices in the commodities market. This could be a source of revenue for players if player-owned stations are ever added – it would also mean that the players would want to crack down on smuggling since it'd undercut their stations' earnings.
Some goods, like raw ore, wouldn't be expected to have manifests. That could make life a little more interesting for miners. Or maybe they *are* expected to have manifests, which you get for paying for resource-rights from the local authority. (Like, you get an upgraded mining cutter which generates a manifest when you mine a unit of ore.) Suddenly, we have claim-jumpers and illegal resource extraction.
Transporting manifests without cargo would also be illegal. You'd be able to delete manifests from your ship if you want, though. This opens up illegal data-running – I could get a small, fast ship, and use it to transport forged manifests from where forgeries are cheap to where stolen goods are cheap. Additionally, it would encourage bloodless piracy, and give the victims of it a chance to recoup some of their losses. If I'm a merchant who isn't above doing some illegal stuff I might be more okay with dumping enough cargo to appease a pirate, because at least I'd still be able to sell the (legitimate) manifests on the black market. As a pirate, I'm happy because not everyone will just fight me to the death since they have nothing to lose.
You could have a manifest scanner you can buy so scan other players' manifests. If you scan a player with a cargo scanner and a manifest scanner, and they don't match, you could report it as a crime and the target would have a bounty added to them. This would let players play as sort of private “customs inspectors” to help balance the smuggling gameplay, and make illegal mining a little riskier.
