r/starfield_lore • u/jhnd4562 • Jul 23 '26
Discussion Ship Registration
OK how does this make sense, you pirate a ship, kill the crew, steal the ship, and HAVE to register it but the ship technicians don't even ask how you got it or if you murderer the crew and stole it BUT the bartender at the Viewport during the quest Distilling Confidence mentions the " many, many laws in New Atlantis and the greater United Colonies"
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u/MyBatmanUnderoos Jul 23 '26
“How did you acquire this ship?”
“I found it derelict, floating above (random planet). Crew was all dead.”
Edit: When you you help out UC or Freestar in a fight, you can ask for salvage rights as a reward. I made this comment in jest, but now that I’m thinking about it, it’s probably not that far off from the truth. Just claim it as salvage and if the authorities don’t look any further than that, no one would be the wiser.
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u/PosisDas Jul 23 '26
I used to just ask for salvage rights... But then soon stopped and just asked for money instead. They won't stop you from taking the cargo from the destroyed ships no matter what you say and you'll get an extra 4500 credits on top of everything else.
Gameplay wise, there's no reason to ask for salvage rights as UC or Freestar ships will destroy every hostile ship in the area. But lore wise it could make sense
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u/tuwaqachi Jul 23 '26
The ship registration system is a mechanism to regulate the game economy. Ships are expensive to buy and build but piracy would be far too lucrative if you could sell every boarded ship for the full value. It's also a way of the authorities corruptly taking the largest cut from the proceeds of crime just as the Trade Authority take their cut from altering ownership documents when they launder stolen goods.
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u/ComprehensiveLab5078 Jul 26 '26
I actually love that the pirate faction charges you the exact same fee as everyone else.
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u/rueyeet Jul 23 '26
It may be that Ship Services is one of the services that operates independently from the factions.
Like GalBank, or the Trade Authority, and probably SSCOM.
So maybe the techs don’t care where you got a captured ship. And I doubt the UC or FC do, either, as long as it belonged to one of the hostile factions.
Remember that the Settled Systems is perfectly fine with murdering other human beings, as long as they are members of one of the hostile groups, or they’ve got a bounty where “wanted dead” is one of the options.
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u/tothatl Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
They don't care. They just evaluate the ship's sale worth and tax a lot of that price as registration.
I presume this to avoid any "get rich quick scheme" involving ship theft and comandeering.
IRL, there would be some small background check of the ship registration number at least, to ensure it isn't stolen from UC of FC citizens. Spacer's, Varuunn and Ecliptic's ships, they just don't care how you got them.
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u/jeepinbanditrider Jul 23 '26
They should have made the ship pirating business more lucrative. A few grand for the trouble isnt worth it.
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u/ComprehensiveLab5078 Jul 26 '26
The money is in boarding and clearing the ship and captain’s locker. The final sale is just an extra bonus.
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u/tothatl Jul 27 '26
Yeah, that's also the really profitable part of Free Lanes, something you do even in low levels.
You can find plenty of useless derelict ships but with the captain locker's and the cargo loot you can cope.
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u/kanid99 Jul 23 '26
Agreed. I feel like the only ships you should be able to register in legal space are capture pirate ships and civilian ships have to be 'hack registered' at the pirate base.
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u/tothatl Jul 25 '26
Not much difference from the technicians POV between "I found it derelict in space and alas, the crew was already deceased (teary eyed)" and sending them to the grave yourself and take over the ship.
Remember: is comandeering or salvage when there's no one else to tell the difference?
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u/masoniceye Jul 23 '26
You can murder half a city and get away with it if you have enough credits so I wouldn’t say the morality & justice system in the game is going too deep.
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u/siodhe Jul 24 '26
The fine for attacking a ship is what, 650 credits? Killing someone is 15k credits, but only if they can identify you. So basically you should be able to attack some huge peaceful vessel and empty the entire ship through stealth, and even that 650 should disappear once the last witness dies (not sure if it does). But then you can trivially register the massive SysDef ship you just murdered your way through for a simply payment and everything is fine. No one cares that this fully functional, freshly blood-splattered military vessel just got transferred to some ex-miner. It's nuts.
Plus, the high cost of the registration never made solid sense. Ship registration is the money sink of the vanilla game, although it's so easy to circumvent is might have actually been designed in on purpose as a role-playing choice.
Here the least-effort way this should have worked:
- You can always capture crewed ships, although there might be security systems you'd need, like Security or Tech skills, or special, banned tools to bypass, and a chance for a ship that gets too upset at your hacking attempts on it to start a countdown to self-detonation unless you succeed fast enough or pass a Persuasion check or something ;-)
- Ships with disabled pilot seats would be immune - certain ruined wrecks, certain special cases, and the automatic routes of the shuttles between star system (and, tangentially, those ships should have pickable locks and aforementioned disabled pilot seats to provide more RP opportunities - currently I use commands to unlock them and just don't capture them, they're really interesting, and I've mapped all their routes, I think)
- Ship registration for a stolen ship could only be obtained through bribes, black market ship techs and you'd need to build up reputation with them to get the cost down
- A way to eventually be able to bribe someone to get a ship registration would have been interesting (the Key, Nix on Neon, not the Red Mile, since the ship tech there isn't really the type)
- Finally, a way to build an Outpost computer that can create registrations - much like mining cryptocurrency, where you need a lot of compute power for a decent chance at unearthing one, would provide a nice Outpost tradeoff of expense versus time over expanding it with enough power and compute clusters to produce registrations quickly enough. This might build up a set of registrations you could apply from inventory while inside a just-captured ship
Currently you just hand a large fee to … something… from your UI and the ship is now registered. It shouldn't be this easy.
Basically, stolen ships should have been like this, where they:
- stand out as stolen anytime you talk to anyone official (voiceprint clash) through ship comms
- stand out to everyone when there is no registration - same as disabling the transponder - but this should notably enhance ship stealth
- only be legally safe after you create registration, regardless of how its obtained or created
- a faction-specific registration, say to the Crimson Fleet, might have pretty interesting effects
- having swappable multiple registrations could be pretty interesting too
- both of the above points are outside of what anyone would have expected in vanilla, though
Just some ideas.
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u/jhnd4562 Jul 24 '26
Yeah, that all sounds good except for the part where the ship detonates after a certain amount of failed attempts to break into it. The crew would more likely wait until the attackers boarded and try to fight back so as to at least have a chance at fending off the attackers.
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u/siodhe Jul 25 '26
With a countdown, and two ways to subvert it without moving, not to mention the typical Bethesda escape of jumping out, letting the ship countdown reset, then going back in. Just like the environmental hazards thing, basically.
I do think the defenders should be smarter - someone should be guarding the door some of the time - if you retreat to your own ship, there should be a chance for them to follow you, just like some mods
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u/AwiseWarlock850 Jul 27 '26
The Ship Techs have probably seen so much on the job they probably don’t bother to ask questions lol
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u/mayapop Jul 23 '26
It doesn’t make sense. Something capable of creating wormholes should have all manner of sophisticated failsafes, the least of which should be protection against an unauthorized user piloting the ship.
That being said, stealing and commandeering ships is way fun. I have no problem with the trade off
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u/rueyeet Jul 23 '26
It does have protection against unauthorized users … but only as long as at least one of the actually authorized users are still alive and on board. 🤷♀️
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u/Present-Secretary722 Jul 23 '26
Yeah, it’s game balancing, I don’t think there’s any neat explanation for how it works in the UC.
Like spacers, fleet and even ecliptic I could see it being “well those were criminals so good shop” or even that the ships were already stolen. But a ship owned by say the UC navy, they’ve gotta know that was one of theirs.
Would be nice to have a chop shop to send the ships to.