Why don't Orbital Trade Ships just rescue the colonists?

[Canute]

Would be cool being able to go to other planets. After you wipe your starting one of all other human life of course.

Isn't this the same as when you start a new colony with different planetary settings and use Prepare carefully to setup your pawns ? :-)

[Bozobub]

The easiest ways to explain why traders won't provide passenger service are, whether singly or in any combination:

• Culture.  Spacers will very likely have a significantly different culture vs. "Dirtkickers".
• Resources, especially specific volatiles.  Everyone needs to eat, drink, and breathe, and their additional mass also = more fuel.
• Space.  There isn't necessarily ANY extra passenger space.
• Life support capacity.  Even if you have the volatiles and space, the life support system simply may not have the ability to deal with more people.

For all we know, traders are simply a tiny passenger cab, a giant cargo hold, and a barely-sufficient engine.

[JimmyAgnt007]

Pirate traders have people on board, I think the whole reason is mostly due to the fact that orbital traders were a temp measure before you could trade with other settlements.  I can sere them being removed eventually so no point in making them part of the end game.

[Bozobub]

Pirate traders have FROZEN people on board, you mean.  As cargo.  They're also pirates, and thus, probably not the best representative of traders, in general.

[JimmyAgnt007]

Pirate traders have FROZEN people on board, you mean.  As cargo.  They're also pirates, and thus, probably not the best representative of traders, in general.

Exactly, frozen, why would passengers be any different?

[Mkok]

As always, this has come up several times in the past. If I am not mistaken Tynan is aware of this and looking for a way how to solve this. He will probably "solve" this problem before the final release.

For now just imagine that those ships are actually what falls on you when you get an evil ship  Noone said those ships are run by humans, they could as well be run by mechanoids 

Or that they are not interstellar, just interplanetary. Interstellar trade ships wouldnt make much sense in Rimworld universe anyway.

[Bozobub]

Pirate traders have FROZEN people on board, you mean.  As cargo.  They're also pirates, and thus, probably not the best representative of traders, in general.

Exactly, frozen, why would passengers be any different?

Exactly!  In other words, adding yourself to the cargo of slavers is probably an extremely bad idea, especially in an environment where organlegging is easy and profitable.  Seriously, marinate on that for a bit; would you go there?

The only people with "extra" capacity are exactly the ones you'd have to be quite mad to use.  It's not like most pawns have that bad a life, in comparison to being a corpsicle, hoping you'll be sold "in the entire", rather than as "bits and bobs", so to speak.

[kenmtraveller]

I would say this all will ended up getting justified in backstory when the game is released.
My guess is that most Orbital Trade Ships are piloted solely by AIs, and don't have facilities to carry live passengers between systems.  The livestock they carry has been acquired in system in trade and will be sold or dumped before heading on the next interstellar journey.  The ship hidden by the friendly AI is a rarity.  There is probably a pirate base in system that preys on interstellar traffic, and its forces attacked the ship that the protagonists were on before the game begin.  Getting picked up by those guys would just result in enslavement.

[Mehni]

I believe the official response was somewhere along the lines of:
"It would be like asking why a fishing boat in Taiwan doesn't take you to America" (Don't quote me on this)

Close, but not close enough for a gold star. As it was Liberia not Taiwan

None of the traders you communicate with are interstellar traders. None of them are going anywhere you'd want to travel to, nor could they, since they don't have starships.

This is like being in a remote fishing town in Libera and asking, "Why can't I just pay one of the fishermen $10 to take me back to Los Angeles?"

(And there's nowhere else you want to be in-system more than you already are, since you chose your landing site when the game started. There are no cities or spaceports, as you can see on the world map.)

(although Tynan also fails to get gold due to his typo. Although apologies to both Tynan and the good people of "Libera" if there is such a place. Unless Tynan was actually referring to the English all-boy choir called "Libera", according to Google. In which case TIL that there is an English choir that formed a town which also plays a part in the fishing industry. A genuinely surprising discovery that!).

There's actually a full thread with a lot more info/justification by Tynan over on Reddit. It comes with a bonus comic.

[Pichu0102]

That's because it would make ship building and ship journeys a little pointless and ends up with very short colonies that abruptly bail the moment a trader shows up.

Simply put, it would make the game too easy and not very satisfying to leave the planet when you can just hop on a trader and fly away.

[ReZpawner]

There are a lot of plotholes in it, if we really WANTED to find them. Even if the glitterworld medicine had been there for ages, it doesn't explain why traders keep getting more of it. It really doesn't explain how there are people who have 'glitterworld surgeon' education from just a year ago, or how neurotamine is getting produced when nobody has the technology to do so, and nobody has access to the glitterworlds.

And to answer the obvious response:

[–]TynanSylvesterLead Developer 21 points 7 months ago

Its destination is: other colonies, towns, and villages similar to yours.

There are no "highly-developed trading hubs".

So at the moment it is what it is, a game concept.

There's a pretty easy solution to it though, if you really wanted to tie it up. Just make so that it's illegal to transport people TO glitterworlds. It's a one-way ticket, and any ships found to try to bring unwanted people in is shot down. That still leaves glitterworlds capable of sending trade-resources TO the Rimworlds and trade for resources, and also explains why nobody offers to bring you back.

Or you know... you could get someone to write a better reason, and not just some random internet person who came up with it at 5:30 in the morning after reading two forumposts.

[Bozobub]

That's actually not a bad MacGuffin.  I mean, there's an unnervingly large number of..."exotic"...hat manufacturers out in the Rim; I wouldn't let any of those freaks in, myself  .

I can easily imagine someone around the campfire saying, "Why can't we just fly off to one of them thar glitterworlds?"  And everyone else just about keels over laughing at the very idea, then they compete to tell tall tales of poor saps who tried exactly that, and their legendary dooms xD .

[Hellburn]

I think it could be some kind of third winning condition: pay a lot (i mean A LOT per colonist) of silver to some (not all) ship rescue the colonists and take then to a glitterworld.

[Shurp]

Simple explanation:

1) Ship takes your silver as payment to fly to Wherever
2) Ship puts you in the freezer
3) Ship sells you as a slave at its next stop

Congrats, you've been "rescued"!

Note that you *can* rescue almost your entire colony this way.  Just arrest them all and sell them to the next pirate slaver ship that comes by!  (Too bad one pawn has to stay behind to operate the trading console)

[Swat_Raptor]

Well you see the trick is you have to craft llama suits for all your colonist and then sell all your "Llamas" and then your just act as stow aways.

Thou it is possible that all the ships which purchase animals are just automated hot dog/ glue factories and don't actually have sufficient life support on board.

actually its possible that all the orbital traders are just Vending machine ships which don't actually have a live crew. they are just operated by a AI.