one thing i loved to do in frontier and first encounters was pick up all the dodgy passengers who were paying well over the odds.
sure half the time i didnt get any payment for it, but if i "accidentally" had a minor malfunction in the engines and had to float dead in space for a while after my jump i was normally greeted with an assassin demanding i hand my client over.
i dont see this as being an easy feature to work in to EL. there is no advanced interface for quizzing the passengers on their motives and asking for money (full or half) upfront. so there is no way to spot someone on the run. while there may be a way to spawn an assassin ship to attack you, there is no way to differentiate it from a normal red ship.
so, i dont expect this to ever make the game, but i do want to talk about it as it was one of my favourite pass times in elite2+3
With regard to being hailed by assassins asking to hand clients over, could this be part of the Trade system? Assassin offers to trade (i.e your passenger) and if you refuse turns red and goes hostile.
Hmmmm....interesting thought. How about if a mercenary Human pilot could ask for the passenger of the human transport ship or kill the ship of the human pilot ship? then using the trade request have the passenger traded to the mercenary....too funny
StarWolves Clan Wing Commander [SW] BraveHart Hellfire Squadron
Motto:\"When All Hell Breaks Loose!! Unleash the Wolves of War and We will Rain Hell Fire on All of Our Enemies\"
Lost in Flatspace II had a feature like this; basically, any passenger transported could be a potential troublemaker. They either sabotaged ship subsystems or injured/killed crew members. You usually got a message that something happened ("Engineer's Name" has been killed) and had 4 choices:
-Hold it and dance: Simply take the passenger to his destination. They paid, no matter if they were criminals or not.
-Drop them off at the nearest police station. Since you could have more than one passenger and the name of the perpetrator was never mentioned, this was a bit of a gamble; they paid you the bounty on the passenger's head, though. If you dropped off an "innocent" passenger, he just walked away, and you failed his transport mission.
-Sell them into slavery at an "independent" (read: pirate) station. They paid rather badly, but you could get rid of all your passengers and get paid, no matter whether they were innocent or not.
-Jettison them into space. You could still get the (reduced) death bounty if you blew up their escape pod, but delivering a perpetrator alive netted about double the money and more ranking points with the police.
You could hire security guards to keep the passengers in check, which took either passenger space (actual security guards) or cargo space (robots) - depending in your rank, those could be replaced with police dogs (cheap and took no spaces) or tigers (snazzy, and no spaces either).
I think it would be rather easy to implement the "jettison" and "sabotage" parts into E:L - the dedicated escape capsule would require a rather massive redesign, though.
-Blackthorne
[Edited on 7-3-2009 by Blackthorne]
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
)
