Engineers Wherever I may roam...

[Pushy]

How far does a pirate (or System Authority ship) roam?
Decided to put my poor Python to some use and go mining. I thought I would go outside the bubble for some nice, peaceful serene mining.
So, there I was, 60 light years away from the nearest inhabited system, and some distance inside the system I chose.
Not seen a single ship in any of the systems I jumped through to get here.
Found a nice metallic ring, dropped in to have a dig about....
Boom 3 System Authority ships, and a prate, all start scanning, then all start shooting.
I got out, but I am now very curious. Just how populated is unpopulated space?

And why can I never post pics? Invalid file? what? What does that even mean? Tried smaller, tried every format Paint can muster I don't even...
A hint gets a screenie from HiP8774 B 2 and my view of the System Authority ships scanning me before they turned red en masse

 

[Julio Montega]

AFAIK based on pre 2.0 test the range is about 200 Ly from inhabited space.

You can no longer upload pics to the forums, need to host them on a site and
link the url, since pic-upload was deactivated.

 

[Trinity Star]

Why would system authority start shooting at you?

 

[Pushy]

Ah, that would explain it. Nice of them to leave the pic upload option in though, not confusing or frustrating at all

I have no idea why they were shooting at me. I was very surprised there was a System Authority for an unpopulated system at all...

 

[Julio Montega]

Ah, that would explain it. Nice of them to leave the pic upload option in though, not confusing or frustrating at all

I have no idea why they were shooting at me. I was very surprised there was a System Authority for an unpopulated system at all...

When in anarchy, system authorities are anarchic

 

[Pushy]

But why is there a system authority?
And why only in sub space?
No ships for several systems while in cruise...

Not to worry though I guess.
Cheers for the replies though, especially about the pics. I was getting pretty annoyed

 

[_trent_]

It's one of those design decisions that I just don't get. It doesn't make sense in either a gameplay or immersion sense.
Rings have surface areas of tens of billions of square kilometers, volumes of hundreds of billions of cubic kilometers and contain trillions of rocks. Despite this, no matter where you drop, you'll be within 10km of another ship - usually one who wants to rob you or kill you.