Unfortunately even with a bounty on my head you or anyone else will never be able to force me into a battle that your likely to win* Because I will allways jump away if the odds are not in my favour. Much as id expect any other sensible pilot to do.
If there were no safe zones, and a way to actually follow/track ships down, then bounties would work, and would be a nice addition to the game, as would some sort of law-level system
* Unless i forgot to put a ship in a safe zone while offline, or i get distracted and leave a ship in orbit too long ie, only when I mess up.
I have to agree with Scion. Catching a pirate off guard isn't easy because we are always on guard. When we go offline, unlike some other players, we use our brains and park our ships in a safe zone. With the rediculas amount of time it takes to set up some of the larger battles, there is plenty of time for us to jump. With my Leviathan it takes a ship with more firepower to be able to beat it. Which means a higher timer. Most of the time that ship of mine is in powered down mode. So all I have to do is increase the power to increase the timer a little. More then enough to ensure I can get away. The reason I run my ship in low powered though is for shorter attack times against mines and weak ships.
meth A bounty system would be nice though. But only if they implement some sort of way to track ships. Maybe in system scanning. Though pirates would be able to use this to their advantage as well. As for preventing us from selling to Earth. If Earth is as desperate for resources as the story makes out, they can't afford to be picky about who they do business with. Also how is the system to know who is a pirate and who isn't? The bounty system? If so then anyone can put a bounty on anyone and prevent them from using Earth. This would hurt players. In particular newer players. If you prevent all buisness being done between Earth and pirates new players wouldn't be able to buy and sell resources as needed from Earth and wouldn't be able to do transport missions. FYI, I am still a new player myself. Only been playing for a little over a week now. If I can survive in this universe then you can too. Your mistake is trying mining early on. Mining just isn't very profitable in the early game. Especially in Sol. Your better off running transport missions inside Sol for a while.