Will people/ships get the capability to activate a distress beacon of sorts that broadcasts their location to nearby ships? This could be a risky thing due to it attracting pirates and such, of course. In the PU as it stands, there are missions with ships that have distress beacons, yet players have none of yet.
TL;DRYes: a service beacon is planned as a dynamic job board where players or NPCs can call for rescue, refuel, escort or hire, filtering responders by reputation, price and speed, and limiting who can answer.
Quick answer is, yes.
Ok.
So, longer or more in depth answer would be yes and there's different caveats to it. So there'd be the distress call so that you can actually pull in more like the authorities or the security forces that might be around you. Then there's the actual, you know, I want to come out and save me, my ship has been blown up. Then there's the possible, you know, hey I want to use this to hire people… so like the mercs or anything, you know, I'm going to fly through this area so I'm going to turn on this service beacon sooner than later and then find out, you know, if I want…
Cause the idea of a service beacon, right, is basically you're broadcasting say…
I'm looking for something.
I'm looking for you someone to do this for me, which the simple case we're talking about here is, I'm looking for someone to come and save my ass cause I'm stuck in space…
Correct. Or refuel or…
Yeah, or looking for someone to refuel, I'm looking for someone to come defend me, I'm looking for someone to come fly on my wing. It's all part that same system that we've called the service beacon.
Yeah, it's a dynamic job board that allows players and/or NPCs to sync up with one another assuming the terms meet when I basically have a guy to refuel me or come to escort me, while I'm going to put it in... I'm going to have a various filter or criteria. What's his reputation, you know, how much...
How much am I going to pay.
How good is he, what am I willing pay, how quickly can he be here… all these things are going to be, you know, elements you can put, you know, within your basic job description and then only people who have compatible interest can potentially see that. Further you'll be able to isolate the number of people, the types of people who can actually respond to these things so that you can only engage in this type of, you know, in this type of contractual, you know, transaction between friends or players in your organization or just anybody who has compatible interests and then it's up to players to basically figure out, you know, how far they want to extend their trust.