A memory from X2; bomb appears in cargo bay when docked at pirate base

[devilofbelfast]

Having docked at a pirate station to sell booty, i remembered that while playing X2 the threat, occasionally while docked at a pirate station a bomb would appear in your ship/cargobay and would detonate upon undocking. There may have been a vocal warning from Betty about suspicious activity or something that played when it happened. Was this carried forward into the later games? I've yet to encounter it in TC/AP but it was just something i thought was kinda funny.

[X2-Illuminatus]

No, this feature isn't part of the later games.

[RAVEN.myst]

Wow, I never had that happen to me in X2, despite thousands of hours - then again, I didn't visit pirate bases much in that one (despite how cool they looked - even if a little too advanced-tech, I guess.) No, I have never experienced this in any of the subsequent games either, and in X3TC and X3AP I often *do* have extensive dealings with pirates - my guess would be that it was taken out (likely on the grounds of being too 'swingy' - I know that I personally hate random, arbitrary catastrophes that negate skill... )

[Timsup2nothin]

That explains the dialog in Reunion...

Been a long time since I played it, but I vaguely remember some sort of Paranoia inducing dialog when docked at pirate stations. Paranoia inducing because nothing ever seemed to come of it.

[Alan Phipps]

Yes, the Pirate cargobay bomb and protection racket routine is randomly operating at Pirate Bases in vanilla X3: Reunion.

Once you get the 'offer' in the Pirate Base BBS entries (whether you read them or not), reloading will not avoid the detonation if you don't pay the protection. Also you can still see offers at that same station visit after paying, but you don't need to pay again.

[RAVEN.myst]

Thanks, chaps, I just learned something new (erm... old) thanks to y'all Too bad I simply can't tolerate the interface downgrade from X2 to X3R - but I do still have campaign games in both to get around to finishing...

[Nanook]

You could avoid destruction by quickly jettisoning everything from your cargo bay as soon as you undocked. The 'bomb' was disguised as a common item. Sometimes you could figure out which item it was while docked if you knew exactly what you had on board before docking. For example, if you had X number of missiles in your cargo bay before docking and noticed X+1 after docking, then it's one of those missiles. Undocking and immediately ejecting all of those missiles solved the problem (except for all your missiles getting blown up, of course).

[pjknibbs]

I can see why they removed this. It was just annoying--it was a random chance to damage your ship from just docking at a pirate base and reading the BBS, which was utterly unfair. I don't know who ever thought it was a good idea to include it.

[devilofbelfast]

Thanks for the info folks. I can see why it was removed as it did get a little annoying after 50 or so times but it was still funny, a very piratey thing to do haha