Talking to any ship

Duncan brought up the idea of talking to any ship. And I wanted to catch that idea in a thread before it gets lost.

Talking to any ship is the easy part. The harder part is having something meaningful happen.

There are a couple of easy additions that we could make. A pirate player could demand the dropping of cargo. And the ship could choose to drop, based on threat level of the players ship. Later, the players level of ruthlessness could factor in. If the player is a well known killer, ships would drop cargo sooner.

If allowing talking to any ship is easy, we should consider adding some kind of menu of conversations. You description of demanding cargo sounds pretty cool. How about requesting aid? We could use the faction relations/standing to determine whether a ship would join you in a battle. What about asking NPC's to travel together (for protection/saftey).

Or perhaps even stock conversation paths? What about stock conversations that have the potential to effect faction standing? i.e. freindly/goading paths that lead to a slight raising or lowering of faction standing? Of course, we plan to add this effect via POG entities who control your faction standing. However, if we mirrored the random conversation and the pog entities conversations, players could never be certain which NPC might turn out to be of use, or have 'connections'. Which would make any conversation have a meaningful possibility, rather than just being a pointless exercise.

Or...how about converstations that lead to 'news releases' We could mirror news releases with NPC's. 'Did you hear about the CMC and the Corliss Conglomerate? Yeah, they are on the brink of war. Those systems could be a huge heap o trouble pretty soon. Best to steer clear.."

Anyways, having at least a limited ability to communicate with all ships would add to the immersion I think.