Pick up them astronauts!

[Vercetti]

Hi folks,

I do not know if this is common knowledge (been pleaying since X2, never thought of this): when a pilot drops their ship and you pick him up, he will pay you to bring him to a destination within the sector (something between 30 and 400k as far as I am concerned). You can see the destination in your cargo under personnel if you click on the person you picked up!

Sorry if this was a well known thing

[Deianeira]

Hi folks,

I do not know if this is common knowledge (been pleaying since X2, never thought of this): when a pilot drops their ship and you pick him up, he will pay you to bring him to a destination within the sector (something between 30 and 400k as far as I am concerned). You can see the destination in your cargo under personnel if you click on the person you picked up!

Sorry if this was a well known thing

What is less well known is that you can eject them back into space and pick them up again. They now want to go to your current nearest station. This way you can deliver them, even if their original destination was an enemy station or they ejected in a stationless sector.

[Novvak]

Hi folks,

I do not know if this is common knowledge (been pleaying since X2, never thought of this): when a pilot drops their ship and you pick him up, he will pay you to bring him to a destination within the sector (something between 30 and 400k as far as I am concerned). You can see the destination in your cargo under personnel if you click on the person you picked up!

Sorry if this was a well known thing

What is less well known is that you can eject them back into space and pick them up again. They now want to go to your current nearest station. This way you can deliver them, even if their original destination was an enemy station or they ejected in a stationless sector.

So basically you can break them mentally, they will lower their expectations through torture. I love that

[Jimmy C]

I just checked three astronauts I had. The reward for delivering them is only around 19050 each.

[Snafu_X3]

I just checked three astronauts I had. The reward for delivering them is only around 19050 each.

Different pilots have different 'drop-off' values, up to (ISTM) +10% of their hull's value upon ejection plus some bonus(es). The bonus may be from a high-skilled trade pilot (that you could recruit rather than simply dropping at their requested destination), morale or some other factor; I haven't been able to investigate this very much so far However, any pilot you pick up & subsequently transport/recruit also increases bail chance (presumably of that pilot's race/faction, for <playership> only) & race/faction rep by a small amount

TL;DR: Ejected pilots have different values for their 'drop-off' cash reward (largest I've seen so far was ~2.5MCr), plus other beneficial effects

[Da-V-Man]

Instead of dropping them off, you can alternatively turn them into Sector/Universe trader pilots IIRC, or (what I've been doing), is turning them into marines at the buyable(/stealable) Marine Traning Barracks from Strong Arms.

I think the quality of marines goes up with the size of the barracks. I know at least the availability of Mechanical/Hacking/Engineering training is affected by it. I need a few dozen to get my my barracks to XXL, and thankfully I encounter a lot of Strong Arms convoys out there

[Midnightknight]

You can also turn them into marines if you have the marines training barrack from strong arms.

[Deeparth]

I just checked three astronauts I had. The reward for delivering them is only around 19050 each.

Some pilots pay over 1 million.

[Jimmy C]

Ok. I saw an astronaut that I acquired had a reward of 85,000 for delivery. The thing is, he also has a Trade rank of 18 and is an International Trader. Is this guy a Universal Trader pilot? Would he be worth more to me as an UT pilot?

[Deeparth]

Yep. You can transfer him to a TS with mk3 trade command software and he'll behave like a high level UT.