I just figured it out: If you spawn a ship with role "hunter" in the station aegis via the debug menu, chances are that it instantly gets a bounty of 20, 50, or 200 credits. This doesn't seem to happen outside of the aegis.
Haven't tried yet whether it happens as well if the ship gets spawned by script. On the other hand, the spawn menu is just a shortcut for a script command, isn't it?
First I thought one of my OXPs had messed something up, but I also tried without any OXPs except Debug.oxp installed. This must be hardcoded.
Yes, it is a somehow appealing notion, but it's not something I would've ever guessed.
I just stumbled across it by accident, because I needed to spawn a bounty hunter for a small test an found myself wondering "huh, why is that ship an offender?". So I spawned another one, and that was fugitive. Took me a couple of attempts until I got a clean one.
So my curiosity was fired up and I did some more tests, outside the aegis, and without OXPs. The results are the findings presented above.
Also, it begs the question: How do GalCop identify bounty hunters? And what about the player, if they pursue a bounty hunting career?
So in the end I'd rather call it a bug, or at least an oddity.
I just stumbled across it by accident, because I needed to spawn a bounty hunter for a small test an found myself wondering "huh, why is that ship an offender?". So I spawned another one, and that was fugitive. Took me a couple of attempts until I got a clean one.
I can't reproduce this. I only get clean hunters. The only ones with bounties are those that have explicit set a bounty in shipData, like the 'Imp Courier' and the 'Mosqito Sport' etc. But there its a choice of the author to give them bounties.
I just stumbled across it by accident, because I needed to spawn a bounty hunter for a small test an found myself wondering "huh, why is that ship an offender?". So I spawned another one, and that was fugitive. Took me a couple of attempts until I got a clean one.
I can't reproduce this. I only get clean hunters. The only ones with bounties are those that have explicit set a bounty in shipData, like the 'Imp Courier' and the 'Mosqito Sport' etc. But there its a choice of the author to give them bounties.
Yes, indeed. It's the shipdata-bounties. The ordinary Cobby III (cobra3-pirate) gets a bounty when spawned as a hunter. It has bounty = 50; and roles = "pirate hunter"; defined. And it has nothing do with the aegis. Now that I knew that the shipdata-bounty was the culprit I could spawn one outside the aegis, and it had a bounty.
However, this means that all script-spawned hunters suffer from this. There are quite a lot of ships which have roles = "pirate hunter"; and a bounty defined. autoAI takes care that they don't get pirateAI if spawned as a hunter. The system populator also nullifies their bounties if spawned as a hunter (just checked that). Script ship adding commands, however, do set the correct AI, but don't nullify shipdata bounties.
