Split: Escape pods and stations

[Disembodied]

Personally I don't think there's any need to be too careful about "cashing in" scooped pilots. If, after a successful ejection, the player always restarts inside a main station, that's no big deal: nobody is seeing what's going on behind the scenes and it's a nice, seamless transition. It's not like we're ejecting all the time anyway. I'd let players cash in rescued pilots in any friendly dockable location (i.e. anywhere that lets you trade), myself – apart from anything else, if it's odd to have GalCop pay a bounty when you unload a miscreant in a Rock Hermit, it's just as odd for them not to take him off your hands when you dock with a behemoth.

What you could do is demonstrate the problem to the player, and give financial encouragement to players to take scooped pilots to main stations, by deducting a "GalCop administration fee" from bounties and insurance payments everywhere except a main station. If you want the full reward money, take your scoopees in to the main station. If you want to make space in your cargo bay, and don't mind leaving whoever it is to kick their heels/heel analogues on some godforsaken rock, then accept the lower payment and shunt them off.

[Eric Walch]

Once docked onto the main station, the pilots would be rescued automatically, as per 1.74.2 - I'm fairly happy to sort out the technical details, as long as we're fairly comfortable with the concept!

It is probably less involving as I thought earlier.
- The unload-cargopods part can just copy the piloted pods to a bay in the station, remove the pod from the ships bay and award a slave in the manifest.
- The player can buy/sell slaves as he likes.
- On launch when loading pods again, one looks first for slaves in the manifest. When present, look for piloted pods in the station bay. When present move them to the ship again.

This has the overall effect of selling the pilots last when selling slaves. And storing them in the station leaves the option to buy them back on a second docking.

it's odd to have GalCop pay a bounty when you unload a miscreant in a Rock Hermit, it's just as odd for them not to take him off your hands when you dock with a behemoth.

That is correct. That would mean only unloading pilots on main stations and on stations with scanclass police & military. Just friendly is not enough as an abandoned station is also friendly and constores have no facilities to deal with criminals.

[snork]

edit - oops, here is a 3rd page of posts already - edit

Possible option for pilots: keep them at the bottom of the slaves 'pile' as you sell them, and at the top of the pile as you buy them - if you sell them by mistake, you can always buy them back, provided you haven't left that station.

A way of differentiating between regular slaves and pilots? The quantity could change colour from yellow to orange to differentiate between them (as it's happening between functioning & damaged equipment ). If you have 2 pilots and 3 tons of slaves on board, and you start selling slaves you would see something along these lines: 5 t, 4 t, 3 t, 2 t, 1 t , -- t, The colour clash is fairly horrible on the forum, but it doesn't look too bad with a black background...

Sounds awkward to me, and moreover it would remove one of the things that you have to find out about ingame.
To me this finding things out ingame, often only after a (sometimes looong) while is kind of "gameplay".
(I sometimes already felt sorry that I had read too much the wiki and forums )

With full cargo hold every now and then in open space I ditched "freed" slaves for probably better loot drifting around. And then later wondering why the bounty/ insurance reward didn't turn up.

So if rewards and bounties go "main station only", then I would like it to be treated the same way - you sell them earlier on : your own fault.

But I really like the bounty/ reward going main-station-only idea.