Nah, the dummy ship is supposed to be a dummy. The ship it was
supposed to be disappeared in jump. Just never came out. The dummy
ship jumps into a completely different system without transponder, the
people who crewed it get off and send it into the sun.
The venting the air idea I also was thinking about. Of course that
would completely kill the PCs before the adventure starts, so not an
option.
So I was thinking: maybe there was a spy for the authorities in the
group of people who pulled this off. The spy can't compromise his/hre
position, but he/she can make it appear as if he/she did everything
properly and give them a fighting chance. Or that stupid computer
system has a safety function that prevents those things to occur
without admin credentials.

Alternatively I was thinking that maybe the architects of this scheme
know that something might go wrong (e.g. some ship full of crafty
adventurers jumping in and finding what appears to be a crime site),
so they prefer having the mystery of a completely ID-less ship with
mindwiped crew than something that  could lead to them. But this idea
has even more holes.

On 22 June 2015 at 17:46, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 10:20 AM, John Geoffrey <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Knowing nothing about the plot of the later episodes I cam up with
>> this: a shipping company wants to commit insurance fraud (think the
>> Titanic/Olympic theories). So they build two ships, one ultramodern
>> cruise ship, one a cheaper and very generic trader. Their plan is to
>> sell the cruise ship outside the imperium, and at the same time claim
>> a loss of the ship on the way to its first destination within the
>> imperium. So they switch transponder signals and try to drop the
>> trader into the sun of a low-traffic system.
>
>> The main characters are stuck on that trader that is supposed to drop
>> into the sun, and they are all mindwiped and don't have a clue what is
>> going on. (the whole ship has been scrubbed of identification). They
>> were low-berth Travellers on the shipping lines ships and had all
>> roughly the right qualification, so they spirited off and claimed to
>> be the crew of the cruise ship (for additional fun the company tries
>> to cash in on their life insurance as well).
>
>
>> But they were woken up due to some quirk in the system. Maybe a spy in
>> the company who didn't want them to die, maybe some computer routines.
>
> If I was rigging this, I would vent the ship to vaccum when leaving,
> and just shut off life support to any of the cold sleep births.  I
> mean, if you're gonna murder people, be efficient about it.  Why
> bother wiping their memories if you're just gonna croak 'em?
>
>
>> Thoughts? I was thinking about using this to introduce the system to
>> two people who haven't played it before.
>
> You want to get rid of the dummy ship, you need it to burn someplace
> with enough traffic that people will see it burn, but not enough
> traffic that someone will try to DO something about it successfully.
>
> But that still leaves you a ship short.  People will look for the
> survivor to try and back-engineer what happened to the deader.
>
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> "Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
> kook." -Alan Morgan
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