What kind of interactions can players have with non-hostile NPC ships? Can we request repair, refuel, and resupply assistance from a passing carrier, trade goods with merchant ships, things of that nature?asked by ArbitrarySketch
TL;DRChris Roberts says yes, players should be able to get refueled and helped by NPC ships, since he wants NPCs to behave like players and be hard to tell apart from them.
So yes, the answer is absolutely yes. Those are all things that we want to do. As I said a little earlier in this section that one of my goals is to make the NPC behavior be pretty human like and they behave and do the same jobs and same actions as players will do and also obscure the fact that it is an NPC from a real player, at least at a distance from people so it just feels like it's a living breathing world that's populated and you'll run into people and hey some may be AI controlled and some may be player controlled. If we do our job right, maybe you won't even realize that a player is playing his ship, you think it's an AI and vice versa, so they'll definitely be able to help you out, they'll refuel you, they'll do all those kind of things they're all sorts of things that we're planning for.