Q&A About Cargo Design

Cotic

Details from Will Maiden

• Crates will potentially have different types of (battery) powered containment. Cold pack, Life support, BioHazard.
• The fidelity of the cargo and crate system will be more clearly defined after the first phase of cargo transport has been tested by players. If the high-level stuff works well, they might look to add more fidelity, which would incorporate all the different types of containment fields and such.
• Crates will be powered internally when moved, but powered by the ship when loaded and locked into place.
• Most ships like HullC's will need to unload at official ports, which require customs. Still working on balancing the required time for customs, since everything would need to be scanned... which could potentially take a long time. Needs to be fun though, so they will need to balance that time vs. the smuggling mechanics.
• Shielded crates simply show up as "empty" spots in your inventory. Suspicious if the authorities are really looking closely.
• The level to which you will be scanned will be influenced by your rep and your past history. If you've been caught before, they're more likely to look closer each time you go through customs. Squeaky clean? They're more likely to wave you through, even if you're using a scrambler.
• Cargo ships should expect to have lighter armaments and will need to bring "muscle". Did not indicate what really qualifies something as a "cargo" ship, since a lot of ships can carry cargo.
• There will still be ways for you to dump some or all cargo from a Hull-C, etc... in space if asked to by a pirate. But that cargo would then be marked as stolen.
• Crates loaded onto your ship are "owned" by you. If those crates pass on to someone else outside of the customs-controlled ports, they would still be owned by you but would be in the possession of someone else. Therefore they are likely to be considered "stolen".
• Hidden beacons in containers will be a thing. Presumably for tracing stolen cargo and finding the destination of said cargo. Awesome.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/5zz795/will_maiden_on_spectrum_unplanned_qa_about_cargo/

Erillion

"I had to dump that hot cargo before the customs cruiser scanned me. I will make it up to you, Jabba!" 


Have fun

SpottyGekko

If this is the level of detail just being applied to "cargo crates", I can see why development is taking so long !

And then there's the inevitable re-works once this system is integrated with all the other systems...

Vrika

Awesome system, but I think more and more Star Citizen suffers from a situation where the scope of their game is everything.

No project can focus on everything and implement every awesome idea they can think of, and still succeed.