"Moon Base Alpha" merges with "Lockout". Before you flesh out your story I think you need a new framework. Why would we put clever criminals up in space with advanced weaponary? The speed of an Earth orbiting object is too slow for traveling through space and the larger the object the less likely of gaining speed with any sort of booster rockets, etc.; the result: day one, station leaves orbit, one million years later it leaves the solar system, only four light years to go to get to Alpha Centauri, yay! Maybe if you launch the criminals on an interstellar mission to colonize a planet somewhere for a promise of freedom you could use a hypothetical interstellar vehicle to get them there. Going off course would be a natural with a boat load of master criminals on board.
Well, the advanced weaponry is for security. Feeble weaponry doesn't compliment the image of "the most secure and powerful prison" all too well, but I can see what you mean. As for the issue of propulsion, I have considered ditching the prison idea altogether, and switching to a(n) sleeper ship/interstellar ship/etc. But I wanted to try a more creative approach. A traditional spaceship, however well-equipped, speedy or otherwise, just seems so boring to me.
Prison ships wouldn't have high tech weapons. They would have annoyance weapons such as rubber bullets or a weapon to knock someone to the floor (with kinetic force) at worse.
I always have a problem with stories that start with "master" criminals. They generally don't exist. You would also need a pretty compelling reason for a government to spend the money needed to build and maintain a space station just to house people in orbit. Government's usually find the cheapest possible way to confine prisoners. If your story requires less than ethical characters as your humans you could always have a bunch of them break out of a regular jail and steal a ship. Perhaps your universe has humans colonized on several planets so prisoners taking off to find their own world wouldn't be that big of a stretch.
I doubt it. If you are dealing with the worst of the worst then it has a higher chance of guards having non-lethal weapons that way if prisoners get them they can still be easily put down. As for what doggiedude said, about the spacestation for prisoners, the same thing happened with Great Britain and Australia, they sent all there criminals there. And in the future there would be not much difference between constructing a prison and spacestation. So it makes sense to have an orbiting prison. But as for alien contact, that would take a LONG time even if the criminals used what thrusters they have unless there are hidden alien stations on nearby planets or via a natural formed worm hole sending them to who knows where.
Power companies hire temporary workers to go inside chambers that have some radioactivity present, I think they call them burnouts; anyway the concept is that these workers are paid well to do a dangerous job that they can either never do again or only for a limited number of times to limit their exposure. So apply this to your prisoners volunteering for a space work detail doing something dangerous on space ships. Sometimes we use radioactive power supplies on long term unmanned missions, so say a probe is launched but has a repairable trouble that requires a dangerous space walk to fix it cheaply, too difficult or not practical to program or guide a robotic device, best dealt with the human touch. You can use the probes space flight mechanism for an extended journey - hard to figure out how to make the probe suitable for supporting life so maybe as a space tug, or the prisoners simply take over their own launch ship and go from there.
I like the idea of having the prisoners in space to do work. That gives them a valid reason to be there. However, there would still need some logic holes filled in. If the prisoners are expected to be awake the whole time there would need to be enough food, water & oxygen for the eventual diversion. If they are in some sort of cryostasis then there needs to be a logical reason the computer or whatever to wake them up when they reach some unknown destination. Would a government pre-program a computer to wake dangerous prisoners under ANY situation when they are out of their desired location? I would think a government would do the opposite under those circumstances.
I was thinking along the lines the repairs would take place in Earth orbit, probe fault discovered before departure to its destination, etc. However I was only trying to provide a reason for Ochalis to put prisoners in space since I think that was a key element to his story line. He could use the concept that a deep space mission was the one with a faulty power plant, prisoners used to do the extremely dangerous work, dangerous to their health that is, and they pirate the mission ship, etc. Might even be able to twist the story line to make them death-row inmates since the mission would be an overdose of radiation, going to die anyway, might as well do it with flare. Ochalis may have come up with his preferred story line by now but maybe we have given him some concepts to work with.
Also just a crazy out there idea if you want them. I love looking at history when writing science fiction. The orbiting space ship could be for Gladiator Arena fights for some new show. The possibility for this would be an over population of prisoners and it could bring in money to help people (or for greed). Just a crazy idea I thought I'd throw out.
