Return Ship

A Mission offered at stations.

Objective

Return an abandoned drifting ship to the client within a set time period.

General difficulty

Easy in some cases, very hard in other cases.

What you will need

• A fast M5 or a ship with Jumpdrive and Energy Cells. System Override Software is useful but illegal.
• TM class ship with Jumpdrive and Energy Cells to dock the ship to when you've claimed it.

What you will find

In the beginning of the game maybe a small M5 or M4 fighter. Later on you can get as much as an M8 or M7.

Commentary and strategy

This is a simple 'retrieve' mission you will need to do to find a ship, claim it and send it back to it's owner. However there is a twist to this mission favoured by many X-Gamers. You can gain by claiming it and NOT sending it back. The downside of keeping the ship in one of these missions is that you take a big rep loss, because it's considered stealing. Aborting this mission, even if you haven't claimed the ship has the same result and the ship will jump away if you haven't claimed it. Shoot it down - rep loss. Abort mission - rep loss. Crash into it and blow it up - rep loss. Keep ship - rep loss. Have ship destroyed by someone else - and you will receive a small sum of money and no rep loss! A curious quirk. Self Destruct will have the same effect as having it destroyed by hostiles.

So choose this mission only if you seriously plan to finish it or plan to keep the ship and suffer the consequences. Sometimes keeping the ship is better worth it than getting the mission reward.

Note that if you do claim the ship and fail to deliver it back on time (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) you will get some sector police spawn dedicated to destroying it. They will continue to try until the ship is somehow destroyed, meaning that these sector police require eliminating with the full repercussions to your race rep of doing so. By luring the police through a Xenon sector using the ship's jumpdrive, this problem can be got round quite easily. Alternately, if you are friendly with the Yaki, dock the ship at the Shipyard in Senator's Badlands; the Yaki patrols will eventually take care of the pursuers.

NB: You can be offered return ship missions for M7 ships from a station where they cannot dock. In such circumstances, simply moving the ship close to the client's station will complete the mission.