The officers were not joking about their intentions to fully investigate what other crimes might have been committed while the unknown ship was committing its immigration violation. They had thirty officers aboard their shuttle, and they got to work the moment that the disabled foreign ship was brought to the basement hangar bays for investigation.
They went over every possible aspect and angle of the ship, and while most of the things that they found were not of any concern to the Terminus Trading Company, they found over fifty patent violations, where the designer had clearly used Alliance technologies in their own designs without permission.
They also found that the ship had been making detailed notes on the Terraforming Device, presumably for the same reasons, but had been unable to decipher the software before they were shot down, so the entire database that they had accumulated was on the design and analysis of the construction methods.
