Madferret, what I had in mind when I spoke about cash penalty is a way to loose cash as if we just used up 1 GG at slave death, without having to go through the process of having to check and replace GG in 15 slaves... I was not thinking about cash spilling out of the ship for pirates to get, only an alternative to GG that would be fair and easy to use

If a radX player has RC skill 16, then his slaves will have +4% per level to all stats, right? That's 64% increase. A 64% increase in damange * 64% increase in rof = 2.69x more dps than without bonuses.

and eventually 20.

That had beeter be at least 7x mroe difficult than iq bana.

*imagines an armada of radx reavers*

First, I forgot that slave masters get 2% per level bonus and Rad experts get 2% per level. So a rad expert gets a total of 4% per level for each attribute. That makes his slaves *way* tougher than any other class's slaves who get half their skills as a bonus.

Second, a modification to the above. Slaves will not get half of all the class skills of their owners, they will only get half of the "outside" skills on the skill chart. The skills that would impart half bonuses to slaves are: Seer, Multifire, Sniper, Speed Demon, and Merchant. A multifirers slave will not have both double dps and the berserker shield bonus.

I don't think this would make the game significantly harder to balance because 1) these bonuses are not huge, 2) slaves aren't nearly as smart as players and will never be as good, 3) no one seems to use combat slaves anyway.
Finally, I've been talking with Atlum about the slave tweaking, and we are now thinking about something more along the lines of a skill that maxes out at level 50 instead of 100 and gives 1.5% per level

...This will make a world of difference, and because of this, I want to make sure not to buff slaves too much now so that we will have to nerf them again later. I think the moderate improvements I've suggested are just about right for right now.