Free mercenaries!
Hooray, free fighters for everybody! :tada:
Or perhaps that's not so ideal...
As this Steam report mentions, there is a mercenary available for a cost of 0 (credits, money, lootz??)
The offending mercenary is the IK-2 Escort from the Federal module:
The IK-2 Escort ship is missing a hirePrice attribute, in-case anyone wants to fix this issue in the future. Since most ships seem to omit this attribute, it might be worth changing the default value to be the same as the sell price.
https://github.com/MovingBlocks/DestinationSol/blob/6d93ffa817dbf26493c684971aa242b9c1f77d9b/engine/src/main/java/org/destinationsol/files/HullConfigManager.java#L180-L181
I decided to finally fix this. It's been almost 3 years!
https://github.com/DestinationSol/federal/commit/f46e494e8260b60b6b0dd321ab586150e499d745
It was suprisingly difficult to find the ship avaliable for hire anywhere.