Talk:Communications Relay/@comment-212.25.57.201-20160402054054/@comment-107.223.130.147-20160411031006

Their ship may not be equipped for planetary entry. It's fair to say that a game with interstellar travel has some ships specialized for certain duties. EG: Aurora was a mining/colonizing vessel, and was designed to haul stuff, but also go into orbit or enter the atmosphere. There may be freighters that are only capable of space flight, as they truck from space dock to space dock on trade routes. With our current rate of automation (eg: we're close to self-drving cars), these freighters could simply be auto-piloted storage lockers with a skeleton crew that handles repairs and a security team to prevent pirates from hijacking it. In a corporte-driven space world, a company ship would be drastically cut-down on life support and crew quarters in order to increase the amount of space that can be used to haul cargo... whcih the company gets paid for. Adding more crew to a ship just adds more cost (you have to pay the person, you have to add more crew quarters, life support, etc). For a corporation running interstellar trade transport, it's jut a cost/benefit game... hauling cargo gets money, hauling people does not. So... barebones crew, no planetary entry capability... but can detect a distress call and simply forward it in when they reach dock. (That's a lot of TMI...sorry, dude. Got carried away. :)