RegistrationID

In an Effort to diminish Piracy GalCop has recently started Demanding ID tags on every ship in the galaxy. existing non ID ships, will acquire an ID upon change of ownership.. For now this only applies to all the popular brands of ships, those we have come to know since the dawn of interstellar space travel.

Protests

A lot of back yard ship factories have protested against this and refuse to put ID tags on their custom or upgraded ships until legislation upon the matter has been cleared about whether or not this violates the rights of the individual trader..

flawed legislation

Independent Space Traders Union also known as ITU, has appealed GalCop's current practice as follows

"it is obvious that the police now, as a matter of routine, demand the production of registration indemnity ID Tags whenever they stop or interrogate a spacer for whatever cause. Of course, if they are looking for a stolen ship or have reason to believe that a particular spacer is engaged in committing a crime, that is one thing, but to demand an ID tag from all and sundry, for instance, from a lady who may leave her mining ship in an asteroid field longer than her license allows her to, or some trivial matter of that sort, is wholly unreasonable. This Act was passed for security purposes, and not for the purposes for which, apparently, it is now sought to be used."

Decision Pending

The Board of Space Vessel Affairs(BSVA) have ruled that current practices must be followed until a decision has been made.. however, according to the supplier of the photo chromatic paint embedded in the alloys of the ID tagged vessels, the ID tags cannot be removed without removing the metal entirely... and changing the assembly lines again could lead to law suits against GalCop and even GalCorp, from the union of space vessel suppliers known as SVS.

What the Wise Men Say

Experts agree that the ID practice is here to stay: however those shops that exist on the fringe of law, should still be able to get away with not painting IDs on their ships... subsequently prices on NON id ships, are higher than ID ships, which also acts as an additional reason not to embed ID paint into the alloy of your vessel.

These shops that are largely unknown to GalCop, also risk getting inspections from GalCop, if they register with GalCop to get an alloted series of ID tag numbers.

The Experts also agree that eventually even these shops will be forced to accept the requirement, they do however also agree that pirates will soon remove the ID tags, when some back yard ship repair shop starts removing the metal or the paint from the duranium alloys, at an extremely high cost of course...

And finally, ID tags may make it easier for Pirates to stalk and find their prey..

Download version 0.12 here