well you can donate that money to me, in case it harms you much 😉

or make yourself poor by donating large amounts to the "church of the flying spaghetti monster"

but i guess that wasn't what youv'e been looking for?

bribe a cop? (x1000), ah i guess that won't work right now.

ok, i make a script exclusively for you, to waste your money if you get bored of it.

hows about a cathouse?

Ultimately, in a completely open game like this, there will come a point where you have all the money and all the toys. It's inevitable. The best we can do is delay that inevitable end point by making it harder to become so rich, which leads to frustration in some other players.

Instead, my goal is to provide enough interesting missions and interaction to keep the player entertained, even if the player is stinking rich.

The richer ye are, the more crooks ye get after ya. That should be easy to implement, right? Can also be done with Elite status/rank/political influence.

Some con artist that sells ye grain with tribbles, a ship with a hyperdrive that's been tampered with ... it would've been the end for ya if ye didn't have enough spare parts with ya.

To keep my 14 wives and 25 children have had to change my Eagle for IP.

This is worse now that you can not make money with local tasks due to rising costs.

If you have a lot of money could buy more ships and hire me as a driver? 😳

Perhaps "almighty" fines could be introduced to strip the player of all their assets if they fly around like an idiot 😆

Or........

They lose their licence for certain classes of ship 😈

We could, if you can come up with a definition of "like an idiot" that a computer can understand.

Perhaps there could be another level or two to the criminal rating, Offender, Fugitive, Super Criminal, Public Enemy Number 1. Petty crimes could be the usual missing permit fees or low level smuggling, but take a Panther full of illegal goods to a system then you better have deep pockets if your discovered. Either that or an itchy trigger finger to blast your way out. The more heinous the crime, the more the fine increases until it reaches "some" limit were the player's assets are automatically sized by the authorities. This can happen in the here and now, why not in the year 3200? This may still leave the player with a fully decked out ship, but no way to pay the crew or carry out expensive maintenance on all that fancy equipment. In such an event, the player may need to downgrade their ship.

Another thing that could be done is that (apart from asset seizure) the ship is taken as well and the player is "jailed" (taken out of the game) for a set length of time. Once the set period is up, the player once again starts with a small basic ship, a few credits and a pretty awful rep. A bit like a really hard starting position.

You can guess the future imagined in the right direction.

The question is: What is the right direction?

We can imagine the future with the current principles? 🙄

i really like the jail time idea. It always seemed a bit excessive that if you commit a minor infraction like accidentally firing your laser near a spaceport that the police would blast you out of the sky. I know that's a Frontier thing, but I'd like it better if the police would swarm around your ship and demand that you land and pay the fine. If you couldn't or wouldn't pay then some of your assets would be seized and jail time would be enforced. If you refuse to land, then they'd blast you out of the sky! If you have an outstanding warrant against you then you could be intercepted and the police would demand that you land at a specific spaceport or else. Perhaps the police actions could be tied to the system's type of government. They would be nicer in democracies than they would be in dictatorships.

...but the penalty for being a fugitive was being unable to land!

I'm thinking of a spacecraft equivalent to the police pulling over a car to the side of the road, and if they discover you're wanted for something they haul you off to jail. Perhaps it should be to an actual police station. That brings up something that I've been thinking about. If you fire over a pad station any ships docked there are instantly replaced by police ships. An actual police station, maybe a single bay mushroom type box with blue lights would seem much more realistic. It could also have a turret when those are implemented. And to stray even further off topic, where are all those ships that are for sale in the shipyard stored, exactly? 😕

They're in the showroom or on the forecourt, to use your car analogy. Not in the docking bays, which don't belong to the shipyard. Perhaps they share a facility with the Police.

Pulled over a ship in space is laughably difficult to enforce. Most ships have a hyperdrive, many have weapons, and all have Newtonian physics. I'd have thought that a scan of the hull (defeatable by shields), the imposition of fines (with remote transfer option) and the prohibition of docking would form the basis of most Police action. They should only launch fighters in response to a ship causing damage to another ship, or in response to the continued presence of a fugitive.

The nature of the Pioneer universe would make it so much easier to remove threats by making them unwelcome, rather than attempting to capture them. Capture is game over, in any case.

Perhaps we should just get rid of the police ships entirely and get some big ground-based lasers or whatever. If you're being a real dickbag, you get the crap shot out of you until you go away. After that, who cares - we're not going to let you land again, so we can be happy with the kind of justice only deep space can provide.

I suppose that doesn't help if you're attacking a dude just out of range of the station guns. Then it might be useful to scramble fighters to assist, but they don't have to be launched as such. There could be police ships forever patrolling designated safe areas - shipping lanes, if you like. Hell, why not just regularly-spaced stationary defence doodads?

Brianetta once likened starports in space to medieval castles. They provide a presence and defensive capability for an area, but any who wants to can just go around it. And why would they care, really - space is big, there's plenty of places to hide and plenty of places to gather new resources.

The idea of space stations or supercarriers in strategical places (medieval castle) was a think I liked a lot in Freelancer, I mean, the way It was implemented. It worked and did give life to the place...

I think the medieval castle analogy has merit for military forces, but I don't see how you can have a safe system without police patrols other than simply not generating pirates in them. The police would have the same, if not better, ability to intercept ships as the pirates would have. They would intercept trade ships and scan them looking for contraband cargo, and actively pursue pirates. You might or might not slip by the patrols with your illegal goods. As for ships for sale, having a dozen, or whatever the maximum number is, ships for sale in a station with one docking bay seems unrealistic. I realize that they're not in the bay, but they have to be somewhere. In a mushroom station one could assume that they're stored underground, but where would they be in the pad station? In FFE there was a hanger that could be assumed to have an elevator inside that led to an underground storage area. I know I'm nit-picking but I'm just pointing out things that break the immersion for me, or at least put a bit of a crack in it. 😉 Btw, the pad station update is just about done. I got some help with it and now it loads almost instantly and has a proper collision mesh and lod. Maybe I'll make a ship showroom and a police station for it later.

Another thought, in corrupt systems the police might demand a substantial bribe and allow you to keep your illegal cargo, in upright systems like Sol they would fine you and demand that you jettison your illegal goods or confiscate them when you dock.

I should think the policing is fairly easy to set up.

In each system the Hyperspace arrival point is the same I believe.

It would not be hard to set up a police presence maintained at the point ships arrive in system. This would not be unrealistic for systems with organised governments.

So if you have a bounty on your head or are carrying illegal cargo the police are on to you very quickly.

Incorrect. Your arrival point is always ~11AU from the primary object in the system, but the actual position is based on the system you came from.

If the actual position is based on the system you came from, then the police would have areas to patrol based on those positions, and the pirates would have places to lie in ambush.

I'm sure the pirates already do lie in ambush, I very often find ships appear behind me when I enter a system, when I'm doing some of the more risky delivery missions and I get a warning you have so and so on board, that was a bad idea and I get chased. So I'm sure it would be easy for the police to do the same thing.

Oh ok, so is there a set number of entry points per system, or just a straight line from that system you came from.

Makes it harder in that regard.

There's a lot of systems. Its a bit hard to lie in wait for all of them.

Those aren't your run-of-the-mill pirates. They appear because you took a risky mission. There are random pirates floating around hunting for you, but due to deficiencies in the code right now they can't actually catch you. This will be fixed at some point.

Right now its straight-line, at the point that the line intersects with a 11AU sphere.

Does this mean, that unless you take a risky mission, that you won't be attacked by anybody randomly?