Unstable Space Fleet Operations notes

By looking at the station construction thread, it can be seen how the fleet operations are essentially building the cluster.

I wanted to add some notes on how the player can interact with the fleet operations, and so bring the meta game home. Some of these ideas have been mentioned in scattered bits, but I hope to tie them together. These features are being considered for the Traffic release and further.

Pirate Raiders

Raiders attack cargo ships and steal cargo. They steal cargo from ships that are a dislike standing or lower. A player who fights against the pirate tolls will soon become a target for the pirate raiders.

Cargo ships under attack will drop distress beacons, the player can attack the pirates, and gain a reputation bonus with them.

Pirate raiders can also attack the player owned mining rigs and steal cargo from the player. One task of the mining player is to keep hostile pirate off his rigs.

Pirate Tolls

Pirate tolls are no longer limited to Lpoints. They will also patrol stations and charge fees to visit the stations. They can move onto player mines and charge the player every time the player visits his own mines. This is called "protection". Pirate tolls only visit if the player has a non-hostile standing. Once the player turns hostile, so do the pirates.

Leading Fleets

The player can talk to fleets using the comm. If the player has a high enough faction standing, he can lead fleets. This allows the player to use mercenary, or police fleets to get rid of pirates. Or the player can use pirates to get rid of hostile megacorporations.

Mercenary and Pirate fleets don't need a high standing, but they charge a fee before they will help. Police patrols will help without a high standing, but they get really angry if you don't lead them to criminals. Navy combat fleets need high standing.

At some point, wouldn't a player tied close enough to a faction, and fielding a large enough number of wingmen, be considered an 'operation' in his own right? How about if at such a point the player begins to earn or collect revenue from the stations/fleets of his faction?....perhaps as an incentive to get him involved with dealing with pirates, enemy factions, expanding the faction, securing trade routes etc? The more he deals with those problems, and helps his faction thrive, the more 'tax' of some kind he can collect. That could allow the player at some point to free himself from his starting career, whether it was mining, trading, spying, exploring or pirating. At that later stage he could forgoe those activities in favor of pure advancement of his factions interests, and the reaping of the benefits of said interest advancements.

The player could become the 'point' man in the expanding fortunes of his chosen faction. Thus as we have spoken of before, the faction itself becomes the drive for the players play. The player looks to maximize and 'equip' his faction with all the goodies, like new stations, trade routes, fleets, and whole systems.