Oolite Bulletins

Here's an idea to take two existing concepts and merge them: Make passengers and slaves interchangeable.

This would mean if you acquired some slaves (cargo container, escape pod, or purchase) and you have a free cabin, they could request at the time of acquisition for you to bring them back to their home world as passengers. If you accept, they become a passenger. No deposit, but some payment at the end.

The reverse would also be true, you could use the 'R' key to select a passenger for ejection. He'd then become a cargo container of slaves. Which you could scoop back up and sell at the next port.

Obviously there would be some legal repercussions to turning your passengers into slaves. I'd imagine that passengers would shy away from soliciting Fugitive captains. You could even use this to carry more passengers than you have cabins, by temporarily enslaving them.

Trust me, you don't want to be a passenger on my ship.

Slaves are not able to demand or request anything:

-they are kept in crygenic stasis.
-they do not have an intercom and
-often speak no Common Galactic.
-a tonne of slaves tend to be from a variety of places.
-to summarise: they are cargo.

An exception to this could be scooped escapepods, which contains crew in stasis, but could have an automated request to deliver it's owners to safety.
This is assuming, that any pod that is scooped is a defective one and you were never even contemplating to sell the crew on a meat-market.
[/b]

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

An exception to this could be scooped escapepods, which.....

Giles is working on something to do with that.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

This is assuming, that any pod that is scooped is a defective one and you were never even contemplating to sell the crew on a meat-market.

Well, I'd rather be in a working pod in a well-disposed trader's cargo bay than in the same working pod crawling through deep space - it just seems safer. On that basis, I can understand getting a reward for picking any pod up and ferrying the crew to the station as free men.

That said, maybe we could have damaged pods that pay more for pickup than undamaged ones?

To make pod pickups work, rescued pods should pay more than the equivalent value of a tonne of slaves, of course. It's not as if a tonne of slaves usually costs very much, after all, and ship crews should certainly have money.

There ARE defective pods...they can be recognised by their drive-units not working.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

There ARE defective pods...they can be recognised by their drive-units not working.

Oh, I've noticed. Not one has ever said, "Thank you! Thank you! Please accept this countersignature bond as a token of our appreciation," either. Ungrateful sods. No wonder people sell them as slaves. Or jettison them again in favour of scooping something worthwhile.

...grump, grump, grump...

working on it, really

aegidian wrote:

working on it, really

Oh, don't worry, I'm not pestering for it, I'm just indulging myself with a bit of pilot-in-character grumping as a joke Right now, I'm too busy trying to assemble my spiffy new station to be bothered by ungrateful escape pods...