Player Features and Ideas Discussion

*****Smuggling mechanism Draft v1.0*****

The context:
Individual players/small corps who will not be able to setup and safe guard Planetary Customs offices, or who simply choose not to pay the natives their taxes to use and pillage their planets, can land their ships in spaceports to collect their PI. They can physically load their PI goods into their ship cargo holds, provided they route their PI goods from their networks, via the PI-hub, to either a corp hanger (much bigger storage space, but can be tracked by the owner corp, intercepted and even locked down until their customs office clears your lewt) or a Starport (which will have a limited personal storage capacity of 30000m3 per player, similar to the current Incarna 1.1 customs office setup). Subsequently, corps can do little to prevent you from routing goods to the starport, but can setup ambushes or interception parties in the event that you do. Starports will have docking fees and notifications. If players choose to land on another corporation/alliance's starport, they will be notified of your arrival with a time stamp and a ship class. They will also be notified of the ship departing their starport. This same mechanism applies to starports of your own corporation, with regards to your comings and goings.

Standings (As set by directors or CEOs or diplos) can affect the docking fees (As set by CEOs), or even docking rights (As set by Directors, CEOs or diplos). Players with red standings, can be booted from the starport after spending 10 minutes or more in the starport (They will show up in the docked list - a new type of list to introduce, that works similar to the assets tab (delayed by 10 mins)). Personal items located in corp hangers will work under the same principle as to enable locking down personal goods of people who try to smuggle it off-world without permission.

Corporations who look down on smugglers, can then arrange gangs to either hover outside the starport and take down the ships as they take off, for a super time-dilated fight to the death in slow mo like Neo (due to the friction of the atmosphere and all that, no warping or mwds will be allowed until you clear the atmosphere), or they can wait for the would be Han Solos in space with bubbles at the planetary orbit entry/exit point. The starport itself would have a spawning area for ships taking off, a radius of 30km. This should give gang bangers and smugglers equal opportunity to have their cake and eat it if the planetary overlords had gangs of 5 or less.

All ships entering and leaving the starport would be vulnerable to Dust small arms fire, once Dust gets released and the Eve side of life catches on.

All covert ops ships will be able to cloak once they undock from the starport, as per the normal spawning at a stargate mechanism. Standard ships with t1 cloaks will not be able to activate these cloaking devices while in the atmosphere.
Black Ops ships will be able to warp out of planets into space as well as jump to cynos while in the atmosphere (To give them that sexy little boost they need). T3 ships with interdiction-nullifiers and covert configs can do the same.

Players who dock on their own personal/corp/alliance starports will not attract any attention from the other natives on the planet or space, unless they spot your network & starport and camp you out.

This in addition to setting up Eve side bubble gang camps at customs offices... if corps were so inclined.

Using this mechanism, players can smuggle their PI goods off world with a little bit more effort than normal, all the while bypassing the customs office and possible extortionist taxes and or non access.



*****Skills for smuggling profession v1.0:*****

Smooth Talk [3]

• 5% reduction in customs taxes and docking fees per level
• (Prerequisites: Social V, Fast Talk V, Negotiation V)

Smuggling [5]

• +12 second delay in docking/departing notifications per level
• (Prerequisites: Smooth Talk V, Trade V, Criminal Connections V)

Infiltration [8]

• +10% chance to avoid starport docking/departure notifications per level
• (Prerequisites: Covert Ops IV, Smuggling V)