Passenger transportation - the taxi roleplay

[fivemilesmile]

Let’s start with ifs:

- What if we had a station near Sagittarius A*
- What if we could have passenger ships
- What if we could take on players as passengers
- What if we could accept payment for a service

So my post is about a new play style in Elite – playing a sort of taxi driver: you buy a ship that can take on 10-100 players /and maybe fill up the empty places with NPCs/ and ferry them to Sag A* and/or back to the bubble. It is about 10 hours of constant power jumping to reach the centre of the Galaxy, and I think for a lot of players it is a hold back to venture out further.

Why Sag A*? Because billions of stars are not discovered, not tagged there yet and I dare say in a 1000 light year radius, and with how the travelling works in Elite now it is unlikely it will ever be – there are simply not enough explorers out there to make a difference. So, by someone taking on players and ferrying them to a station nearby, which would have the equipment and ships to support explorers, the process could be accelerated.

Let’s say it would cost one million credits for a ticket to Sag A* - with 100 passengers it could earn the captain of the ferry 100 million credits in 10 hours or so, which is a decent income, and he also gets to scan and discover in the same time.

This player would have a time table; say he starts flying on every second Saturday evening at 18:00 Galactic, you have to travel to the station he starts out from in the bubble, buy your ticket and board by that time /or just to simplify things, buy your ticket and you will be automatically aboard at 18:00, whatever and wherever you do/ and arrives next morning by 9:00 am. You – who bought the ticket – won’t be able to do anything else in the meantime, except walk around the ship, maybe gamble in the game room, socialize with the other players and NPCs on the ship, or do some Arena – but your char’s “home station” during travel time would always be the ship.

So this is how I imagine it: you buy an Orca-like ship (there is a bigger ship coming from Saud Kruger, isn’t it?), or maybe refit a Cutter or an Anaconda, then announce on GalNet or on some other forum(s), that on say 14th of February, 3303, at eighteen hundred (18:00) you will start jumping to Sagittarius Station. You have 60 seats on your ship, plus two fighters in your hangar bay (for protection, as this will be happening only in Open), players could sign up to you and pay the fee. All your unsold seats will be filled up by NPCs when you start out to make it surely profitable – maybe even taking a celebrity or two from time to time, paying you higher (for executive suites maybe), then you start jumping. Peps in the meantime could walk around your ship, doing things, or just simply not doing nothing, as they went to sleep, thrusting their avatars on you to take them to Sag A*, and when they wake up next morning, and log in, they will be at Sag A*, buy a new ship, fit it for exploration and go out there and tagging new systems with their name.

For those who buy the ticket, it would be a good thing to cross this distance while they are actually not playing – would save time and effort for a reasonable fee, for the taxi driver it would mean a good income and a brand new RP type.

Maybe it could be applied for ship trafficking too – you buy an Anaconda at a discount in the bubble, fit it for racing/power jumping (40 LY hops with that one), fly to Sagittarius Station, sell it there for a hefty profit, then buy a ticket home. This could be the only way to market big ships over there – smaller ships could be carried with bigger ones or produced locally, but big ships would have to be flown there one by one and probably would always be in short supply -> high price.

Any ideas on this?

It is evolving thanks to the amazing suggestions, examples:
- Pilot standing/evaluation: the safer/higher level service you provide, the more likely you receive higher paying passengers - rich merchants, officers, dignitaries, politicians, the lot.
- A tier system coupling it to the ship types, i.e. a T6 converted for passenger hauling cannot mount high class passenger modules, while all the SaudKrugers and the Imperials (Courier/Clipper/Cutter) can.
- Insurance: what if you get destroyed and every of your passenger bites the (space) dust?
- Open it up for other distances and places, and not just for passengers, but station construction materials, things that really make a difference, not just commodities.

[Twelvefield]

Passenger compartments were supposed to be in the game by now. The Orca would have been a high-end limo service. You were supposed to be able to buy and mount passenger compartments of different ratings, from steerage to ultra-luxe. What kind of compartment you could get would depend on your spacebux and your rating. What kind of passengers you'd get would depend on your compartments. The Trumpier the passenger, the more you'd get paid. So, hauling a farmboy, an old man, and their droids around the galaxy would be a waste of time.

Obviously, this idea got shelved. I suspect it's because the mission system has proven to be too screwed-up to easily unscrew, as evidenced by the delay in Horizons. I imagine once missions work more logically than chaotically, we'll see space taxis.

[ronniejw2002]

mrraybaker eredeti hozzászólása:

I'd pay to go to stations in other places where I could then buy a new ship (links to the distant zones being aliens on another thread) pootle around and then get a taxi back.

I'd never pay a RL pilot to move my ship. Quite simply even thouse I'd trust as people how can I trust their piloting skills? what happens if they die? How do I get my ship back? Who pays insurance? etc.

EVE Online has a system called Courier Contract for transporting goods, including ships, too far off locations (they don't fly your ship to another location they carry it in a large hauler). The way it works in EVE is that they have a contract menu that you use to set:

- the amount of money you are going to pay (reward) for the courier to transport your goods or ship.

- the amount of collateral the hauler must put up to cover the cost (the money is taken from their account when they accept the contract and held until completion or failure) of your goods should they fail to deliver (if their ship is destroyed while carrying your goods or they just decide to steal your goods). You can set the amount of collateral to a larger amount than the replacement cost of the items being hauled.

- the number of days the contract should be available in the contract system (if nobody accepts your contract within the specified number of days the contract expires).

- the number of days the hauler has to complete the contract.

- the pickup and drop off stations for your goods.

So basically the way this works is that you open the Courier Contract menu and enter this information and your contract goes into a system like a bulletin board where other players that have haulers can browse through the contracts and accept any they wish to take on.

There are even whole corporations (guilds) built around providing this service in EVE. The one I used when I played EVE Online is called Red Frog.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=6491

This worked great for when you wanted to move to a far off location through hostile PvP zones. Once your ship(s) were delivered you could then fly there yourself in a small stealthy recon ship to, hopefully, avoid the PvP players and arrive at your new home system all in one piece.

A system along these lines should work in ED I would think.

[ronniejw2002]

Select This eredeti hozzászólása:

I think it's a great idea this taxi transport, tho maybe a bit out in the future. If/when we get an actual avatar that can move around inside ships & stations, drift outside a ship etc. then i can't see anything stopping this from happening too.

The only tech issue is prolly how to ensure and secure a character if he/she is actually moving between systems ingame while the "owner" (the player) is offline. That's a little over my head but i dig the idea

I can think of a whole laundry list of things I would like to see in ED before they make it so that you can move around in stations and such.

EVE Online did this to some extent allowing you to walk around in your station hanger (they waited about seven years to do it) but after about five minutes of walking around in there I concluded that it was just a waste of time.

X-Rebirth made it so that you had to walk around inside stations to hire crew and get better trade deals and it was a total flop and the first thing I did was to install a mod so I didn’t ever have to walk around in station again.

I didn’t mind leaving my ship and moving across to a ship I had captured to repair it and send it to a station using autopilot in X3 so I’m not completely opposed to the idea but really I don’t want to see ED spend time right now on adding more boring content to a game that is already boring enough.

[nzguzzi]

I will be the Fake Taxi and post my vids on the net of my " deep explorations to Uranus"

[Kamiyama]

I'm still hoping they use passenger ships for colonization. All those habitable worlds and terraforming candidates we find while exploring? Players should be able to take colonists to them and found colonies, build infrastructure, and even get them building stations.

It makes passenger ships useful, introduces a huge money sink, and gives players something to do.