Questionable Questing

ryuan

While battles can get bloody, special events and bad luck can whittle down the crew. Imagine watching your colleage dying while shifting junk when you survive a fight with suicide bombers.

ryuan

Not to mention the consistent death of colleagues every other salvage operation even with state of the art (>100% chance) equipment.

AnotherLurker1805

This is even bigger when you consider that Salvaging would simply be more common than large scale battles. Even if we accept the absurd turnout of fleets that you see in the game, there are salvagers all over the sector at all times. Being a salvager is hell, a constant risk of death for little reward and none of the glory.

magic9mushroom

There aren't *that* many salvagers, at least by the amounts you see in-game. And one must remember that they have a decent chance of dying in combat too - it's nearly an even chance for the people answering your distress call to be arsehole pirates.

magic9mushroom

I think most of the deaths that occur in an average game would be from decivilisations and saturation bombardments (rare, but a size 7 colony going down to size 6 is 9+ million dying, which just utterly swamps everything else).

magic9mushroom

This is also the prime cause of unnatural death in the backstory, since Mairaath was at least size 7 (vast ruins) and Opis was probably size 8 (the refugees were enough to bring Sindria and Volturn to size 7, and that's just the ones who got out before the earth-shattering kaboom; I refuse to believe that any significant chunk of people could have been rescued from that).