Pioneer dev forum

I was surprised to discover that we don't actually have any mechanism for paying bounties, thus you can't actually hunt pirates for bounty.

Sure, you can scoop their cargo crates, but technically that would make you a pirate-pirate (anti-pirate?), plus you need cargo scoop (and do the scooping work), which puts constraints on your ship and equipment for hunting pirates.

Minimal implementation

Ships spawned by data/modules/Pirates.lua have a bounty to their head depending on ship tonnage/model (and weapons?). Size of bounty should be significantly lower than assassination mission rewards.

In onShipDestroyed, pay bounty to player (but only if they did the killing shot - I guess we can use the same code that iterates player's kills), display some message from pilot's guild or similar

For now: ignore enemy ships spawned by mission modules, they might not be known pirates, but discrete assassins with no bounty award

Though ideally: if a mission module has spawned pirates they should also have a bounty.


Preferred implementation

There's the issue with how fast do you get payment in deep space. My solution is this, which would also give some nerdy achievement chart-bling-bling:

1. in InfoTab / F3 there's a Bounty tab (or section) with a table
2. Table has columns showing ship's registration number, ship's model, bounty reward, (and maybe pirate's name)
3. When you kill a pirate, the registration and ship model fields are filled in, but not the bounty or pilot name - we don't know that in deep space
4. When you land the bounty (and pirate's name if we care about that) is filled in, and you're payed, and get a message to that effect.
5. Specifically: you're payed by the current faction's police force, this is good because it reminds you which faction you're in (otherwise easily not noticed), perhaps some factions pay more like a 1.5x premium for instance, so it's better to collect in a different faction? Would be cool if you had to manual go to the police station (tab) and request bounty payout. Would make visiting police more useful, plus self-documenting the existence of bounty hunting.
6. Maybe police list their bounty payouts? "100t = $500", etc., but then it would have to be simple, only based on tonnage, not pirate captains noteriety.

Example:
Over-complicated implementation

Player must outfit their ship with a gun camera. Perhaps the gun camera slot is not on the ship but on the weapon, thus when you buy any kind of weapon, your ship is fitted with a gun camera slot? Sounds like a lot of code-work, for very little payoff. We can just say all ships/weapons have a gun camera built in.

(If you have a gun camera, do you turn it off when you want to be a pirate in deep space? That might actually be interesting. But require some UI button, and consequences if you forget to turn it off.)

Anyway, I don't have time & motivation to implement the above at the moment so I'm leaving it here, hoping to inspire someone to pick it up.

From lore perspective: how about stations always upload and exchange bounties with all ship computers (in the same vein all ships carry spacenet data packets for an asyncronous internet between systems)? And if it is an inhabited system, then there's a bounty database the computer can access any time anyways.

Or it could be a roundabout approach: all kills are logged by your computer, and you can then go to the police station to check if they were wanted. So there could be a list of kills, and you'd check them off the list at a police desk. Maybe the police would pay for bounties issued by their faction, but not for those issued by others. But now you'd know where to cash them in. And maybe kills would time out after a while if you don't cash them in (to incentivize travel and to avoid long cluttered lists)

From lore perspective: how about stations always upload and exchange bounties with all ship computers

Sure, works as an excuse for the "minimal implementation" that just gives bounty at kill-time. (Though would payment from the bank be instantaneous)

Or it could be a roundabout approach: all kills are logged by your computer, and you can then go to the police station to check if they were wanted

Possible, but sounds over-complicated: If police has a list, technically you should be able to go out and try to find those pirates (which is a bit in reverse how pirates are spawned at the moment), but would be interesting/realistic game play. I'd imagine that list of wanted pirates would be large - space is big, and if you keep running into them when you jump to systems, there has to be a high pirate density in vacuum.