What is roleplaying?

[Levenna]

Some good points raised here, and I would also add that there are a number of people who play on Disco where they very much struggle with the English language and genuinely do not know what the RP part of the server entails, through no fault of their own.

With regards to being caught in the wrong ship in the wrong sector, I would point you towards the House Roleplay Laws. If you're in breach of the law, you are fair game and ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the law (for most police forces/navies anyway). That being said, I have seen some people escort people flying an illegal ship to a nearby base and ordering them to change it. But bear in mind, if you're flying a freelancer Defender for example in Liberty space, that possibly amounts to theft of government technology and we the LN do not know who you could have been sharing that technology with, be it insurgents, rogues, outcasts, etc. therefore destruction of said technology is 100% warranted inRP. Freelancers are an unknown quantity in any given situation for lawfuls, and are rightfully treated as such.

Now, if you want to earn the right to fly an illegal ship in government space, every government has a license requisition centre where you can request permission to fly an illegal ship. If John Navy comes to bother you about it, point them to said registry and you are doing nothing illegal. Here is Liberty's, Bretonia's, Kusari's, Rheinland's, and Gallia's. If it isn't specifically a ship you need to request a license for, you can look around on the government subforums for the relevant post.

As for shooting on sight, prisons do exist, yes, but we the players have no way to enforce a law by godmodding someone's character and stating that they cannot play the ship they worked before because they're in prison. There is no functionality for it in-game, and even if there were, that's paramount to giving people the ability to lock people out of their characters at will by sending them to prison, and I for one can see a lot of ways for that to be misused to say the least. Shooting people is the only way people really have to reliably and (somewhat) meaningfully enforce the law.

Finally, I will touch on your points about player agency. Yes, you have a right to roleplay your character as you see fit. Other people also have a right to see your character through their own character's biases (And yes, some players unfortunately also muddle that with oorp bias). It is wholly unrealistic to expect a character to have sudden and intimate knowledge of every facet of everyone they come across. If my Navy character comes across people breaking Liberty law, she sees them by and large as lawbreakers. God forbid you come across LSF when breaking Liberty law because they're likely to be even less forgiving.