False ID's, bribes and other illegal stuff

[Xante]

Hi folks!

While fighting against factions I never requested anything from I was thinking that a false ID would be fine to buy somewhere, on seediers locations / pirate stations for example, in order to make your person again "unknown" by a faction and therefore get your relationship-factor to them again at zero. There would be different false ID's for different factions, all of course more or less expensive, depending on the faction chosen (aeran pass would be very expensive, whereas uln ID would be cheap, p.e.).

Thinking further, I think that you should be able to pay a bribe to a ship that's chasing you, or a station refusing docking clearence, maybe shooting at you. The offer would be randomly accepted or denied, depending on the guy you're asking, if he's corrupt enough. Then again, pirates would accept and make an offer in 90% cases, whereas confed bases would maybe accept in 5% cases, and then again for different amounts.

[loki1950]

Nice new wrinkle but maybe to close to reality


Enjoy the Choice

[bgaskey]

Definitely an interesting idea, and I think it should be doable with python scripting (correct me if wrong).

And depressingly similar to our government today .

[Xante]

To close to reality?!?

I see you guys have humor.

I think the fake ideas are important to maintain the open end style of the game, so that you can take a new path during your game, i.e. change from a pirate to a bounty hunter or a merchant. It is now impossible to gain back a good reputation once several faction are ennemies toward you.

[chuck_starchaser]

We had a loooong discussion about fake ID's at the WCU forum, once. What I wanted to do was come up with a theory for how a ship ID system could work to produce the the experience one gets in Privateer in particular, and WC in general.
Certainly, gratuitous faking of id ought to be just not possible; otherwise everybody would do it. You'd even have it programmed in your ship computer to automatically change id's to look friendly to whoever is around.

What we came up with is an idea of tamper-proof transponders with a unique ID number they return.

To prevent people from moving the transponder of one ship to another, many integral parts of the ship, such as engines, reactor, computer, etceteras, would have short-range transponders as well. When a ship is manufactured, all its subsystems are given the same ID, and they periodically check each other out, and at the first evidence of tampering would stop working.

Ship manufacturers would get their transponder cores from a central authority. They would not be able to manufacture their own, or to alter them for a "special customer".

Upgrading a ship with a new reactor or whatever woud only be doable by authorized dealers who can communicate to all parts of a ship the intention of substituting the part. Then the transponders "kiss good by", digitally speaking, the outgoing part, and wait to welcome the new one.

What's in an ID?

Nothing. Just a unique number. Why? Because ships can change owners, and the new owner could be of a different faction. Even the same owner could switch allegiances. So "faction" is not returned by the transponder; only a ship ID.

So how does FF recognition work?

Each ship keeps a database of all ships known. A copy of the database, rather. This database is distributed. Every time you dock at a station or planet it gets automatically updated.

And where's the data come from?

If a ship attacked you and was in the company of Retros or Uln, then your computer's heuristics will take that as evidence that that ship is in control of the Retros or Uln, and upon docking at a station will inform the station computer of the event. Station computers automatically "spread the word" to other stations directly or through the ships that come and go.

Thus, the best you'd be able to do is to physically shield your transponder so that it doesn't return an ID.

For this system to be implemented in-game, we'd need, first of all, to somehow decouple ships from their pilots. Suppose you've killed a corrupt confed official that all low-level confeds hated. Officially, you could be tagged as 'enemy' to confeds, and their ships would be colored red on your sensor screen; but the pilots, rather than attack you, might greet you, and even help you if you're in trouble.

This decoupling would allow for certain missions in Privateer that right now don't work like in the original. Apparently friendly ships that suddenly attack you, and *then* turn red, for instance. That is, the FF system bases its coloring on prior information, but its heuristics can quickly adapt to a changing situation.

In other words, we'd need to have a FF system that is less than perfect; --capable of making mistakes.

This was the subject of an old feature request of mine. I'm using this opportunity to bump the request.

[Xante]

That's quite complicated, what you are suggesting. I was more thinking about a personal ID, something like a flying licence, wich you have to insert into your transponder to start the ship, and wich gives your ID information to other ships transponders, wich then check up their own database to look if it's faction has a bounty put on you or if you are friendly. So if you have a fake ID, they wouldn't know you and consider you as neutral for the moment.

Anyway, I doubt that enemy faction would exchange each others datas on pilots. At the end everyone would know who is friend with who, and it would then be easy to everyone to intrigate agains whoever he wants. And I'm still not talking about difficulties to share spare-part ID's in such a divided space. Who would manage the central agency? Confeds, aerans or rlaan? Not sure they would once sit around a table and find a compromise...

[chuck_starchaser]

Who would manage the central agency? Confeds, aerans or rlaan? Not sure they would once sit around a table and find a compromise...

I think they would. Just like there was international agreement to cut CFC's, it's in everybody's interest to be able to tell friend from foe, and avoid a much greater chaos of having friendly fire battles raging everywhere in addition to the real conflicts. But this is just my personal opinion. The idea of a personal ID card you have to plug into the ship to start the engines is a good one (if so in addition to the ship ID). I'll have to sleep on it.

[Xante]

Ok, you're right on the actual (terrestrian) international agreement, but this one is related to a very restricted space (earths atmosphere), so this can easily be controlled. But in the galaxy, one faction could build a factory and then battleships without having anyone finding it for years, and this way they can build up a fleet in secret... but if they have to report the ID's of every new ship to a central agency, then say goodbye to the surprise effect when they jump in a battle the ennemy thought he allready had won.

What I want to say is that it's much easier to receive the ID-information of a ship on the moment than to have it allready stored into your ship, but maybe wont ever have to use it, but therefore have to update data every now and then.

The US air force do recognise an enemy fighter when he sees one, even if they didn't even know about his existence... how do they do? Well every faction has it's own transponder signature implemented. But since in space you can buy about any ship you want, the pilot has to communicate his ID to his own transponder before this one can transmit it to the other transponders. And to avoid pilots flying with no ID, an interstellar agreement could force shipyards to make their ships unusable without a "genuine" identification of the pilot.

But then again, just like any identification, these may have been falsificated by well organised criminal groups...

[snow_Cat]

^ - -^ What if the false ID were only temporary? IT would take factions a few hours to realize that you left ship/transponder signature at station A and a new/fresh signature is now heading to station B.

^- - ^ This could be useful for creating a bit of drama for smuggler runs.

[demagogue]

hello, first post.

The temporary-use of another pilot's registered ID is an interesting idea ... pilots could share/swap/sell to each other, but only for a temporary window, two IDs couldn't be used at the same time, and then both parties couldn't do it again for a long while, so it wouldn't be abused. But may also be problematic.

I was wondering if the "fresh start" idea could be put in there as well, and also a way to tighten up worries of abuse.

I thought about one variation on Xante's idea of each pilot having their own registration ID is for each pilot to have something more physically hardwired to them, that's what gets registered, instead of a code, more like a registered analog fingerprint or a retina scan (I'd vote retina scan; more scifi), and you need that to operate a ship as the pilot registered under that scan, and it gets transmitted, and it's unmistakably an individual pilot.

It would be similar to a personal ID number (I mean, the computer would treat it as a number) ... but some differences (aside from sounding sort of cool). It's physically connected to the pilot. One idea: it's not enough to just steal a number from another pilot, you'd have to find a way to physically get a copy of their scan. But using a copy of a scan might get you a very temporary pass, but might quickly be discovered as illicit and an infiltrator (since no copy can be as perfect as a person's actual retina).

But more interestingly (my main point), it seems like a more natural way to allow a pilot to re-register itself to clear its record, as if it were effectively starting off as a new pilot (although keeping their previous ships, money, experience, etc), without fearing too much abuse ... e.g., may be possible to get surgery to literally change their retina, and then they can re-register as a new pilot with the new scans (then the old scan is lost to limbo, maybe that could be sold to someone willing to have the surgery to get the new scan without having to register? Or, better, you could just say the surgery can never be precise enough to perfectly copy another person's retina; it can only create a new one from scratch) ... but of course one can only have the surgery very, very rarely for it to work (once a year or few years or something), and it's very very expensive. But if a pilot really wanted a fresh start, they could save up and get the surgery and be registered as a pilot under the new scan.

(I don't think there should be a limit in number of times, or a risk of blindness, e.g., because those are irreversible, which goes against the grain of the game; there should just be a very very long wait between surgeries to allow healing, to prevent it being used too much and abused. Also probably shouldn't be able to clear their retina or fingerprints to make them "unknown" to everybody, although it sounds interesting, but the most likely result is it would make them an untrusted enemy to everyone, so no one would reasonably want to do it. I'm still thinking about if you could copy another person's scan).

Anyway, I'm just thinking aloud...

but if they have to report the ID's of every new ship to a central agency, then say goodbye to the surprise effect when they jump in a battle the ennemy thought he allready had won.

You could take care of this the same way Int'l Law takes care of ships in the high seas now ... an unregistered ship doesn't get certain protections in int'l law and is immediately suspect, like a prima facie enemy to everybody (the major powers, anyway, smaller nations won't care as much).

A lot of these issues you guys are talking about are covered in the Law of the Sea (UNCLoS), which was drafted by the way in the height of the Cold War between the US and USSR, so they had precisely in mind ships of various and shifting allegiances crossing through int'l waters, etc ... I'd recommend you have a look to see it handles a lot of these issues, since they are well thought out. E.g., look up how the int'l ship registration and "flag of ship" issues are handled.

[chuck_starchaser]

Not bad for a first post.. Welcome aboard!

Eye surgery sounds a lot less painful than hitting [1] a million times

Just adding a link for the Law of the Sea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nat ... of_the_Sea

[loki1950]

Eye surgery sounds a lot less painful than hitting [1] a million times Very Happy

But hacking the file is painless if you backup that is
and welcome aboard demagogue

Enjoy the Choice

[Xante]

demagogue, your idea is well thinked, wasn't there a faction called shaper, wich multiplies itself by cloning. Therefor, the retinas of a whole specie are almost the same.

Nevertheless, since genetics are so widespread in VS, it would be possbile to change the retina by genetic modification instead of surgery. Only luddites would use surgery since they are against genitical mods.

On the other hand, I don't understand the reasons for limiting the frequency of ID-change, since IRL one can do it as often as he wants, and even have several ID at one time, if he can afford it.

[snow_Cat]

^- - ^ What if assuming a new identity forfeits the old one and its assets (ie: rank, money, contracts); and the cargo aboard ship is then considered pirated because it belongs to the old identity?

[loki1950]

That is most likely what would happen as computers are not that good telling or detecting lies.

Enjoy the Choice

[mortaneous]

I'd imagine computers could lie very easily.. especially if they couldn't detect lies. If you lie to the computer to begin with, as long as it's in a valid expected format, the computer would lie-by-proxy to anything that asks for the (fraudulent) information it was given. It's just a matter of how good your lie is, since it would likely be checked against a database.

e.g. Police have the connection to the state DMV & criminal database in their cars... you get pulled over with a stolen car and forged driver's license, they run the driver's license and car's plates... as long as the license, plates, and your appearance match up (and there's no warrant out on the ID you gave them) there's nothing the computer would give them that indicates a lie. Of course, the officer is still entitled to be suspicious, but that's no fault of the lies you gave to the computer that it gave back to the officer.

[loki1950]

That's basic mortaneous meant to edit to add "garbage in-->garbage out" as any data base is only as reliable as it's data is if the data is compromised in someway there goes any reliability.

Enjoy the Choice