The possibilities are, quite literally, endless!
Also, wouldn't it be good to be able to post your own ads on the bulletin boards, for example: 'Spacious, comfortable, fast ship, travel to all nearby star systems,'
if you've got a big ship with lots of cabins. You could charge what you want that way and, based on your reputation, people would be more or less happy about paying it! Or if you've got some high profile cargo/passengers, you could put up an ad to hire some escort ships to come with you.
It would also be good if you could own more than one ship and keep them in different systems (within a reasonable limit, obviously). That way, when you see a whole load of people wanting to travel to 'x' star system, then you can wheel out your big, clunky liner type ship and put your nippy Cobra III into drydock, so to speak! Or maybe have an option to attach smaller fighters to larger ships so if you're flying a big transport and come under attack, you can hand the transport's controls over to 'George' and jump into your attack fighter!
I'd like to see some subtle (and not so subtle) differences when travelling to different space stations, slight changes to bulletin board style and what the interior of the spacestation looks like, so you feel as though you've really gone somewhere new, instead of the identikit look we have now. When travelling from Federal space to Imperial, the differences could be much more noticeable, whereas if going from Sol to Tau Ceti (for example) they could be more subtle. How about having the style reflect the function of the station? Ross 128 could be very sombre and harsh looking, to reflect its status as a prison planet, whereas Sol could be very welcoming and colourful, to represent its status as a tourist system. All we need is a number of different styles to scatter around the galaxy, just enough to feel that you've actually gone somewhere new, but not so many that the size of the galaxy has to be reduced. Also, all of the generic replies made by people on the bulletin board should be voiced in different styles, too as well as announcements of ships departing/arriving at the station, just to add a bit more ambience and up the immersive factor a touch.
It was mentioned in the Frontier manual, but you couldn't actually do it in the game: destroying or making a ship surrender and selling the occupant(s) into slavery. Why not have that in Elite IV as well?
If suffering a mis-jump (because you neglected your ship) or running out of fuel, there should be some sort of rescue service to bring you back to port, with a slight knock to your Elite status, after all, running out of fuel or forgetting to service your ship and needing a tractor-tow back home is just a little bit embarrassing, especially if you're a big 'n' bad fighter pilot/assassin/pirate!!
As well as being a 'freelance' pirate, what about being able to join pirate 'clans'? These could generate their own missions and have their own rankings, etc. The same could be done with a sort of 'assassin guild', ok that's a bit Oblivion, but the Dark Brotherhood was one of the best things about that game (I loved Oblivion by the way).
As far as the structure of the game is concerned, a storyline would be good, but not one that is tightly scripted, or one where you stop getting missions when the storyline is complete. There should always be dynamic, unscripted events occuring that would generate more missions and the game could be designed for the devs/us to design extra campaigns and just plug them into the game! But overall, I'd prefer unscripted, dynamic events to a tightly scripted campaign that, once you've completed it, leaves nothing interesting to do anymore.
The devs could design new tech/ships/factions and so on that we could download and thereby keep the game fresh for as long as we want to!
Finally, and this is really quite important, please improve the AI of the enemy ships! I've had occasions where they try to shoot me with their front laser while I'm on their tail! I've also never had an occasion where I couldn't shake an enemy off my tail, it was simply a case of nibbling away at their shields/hull until they were destroyed. It was always a case of when - not if - I win the battle, making combat a touch boring. Also, why not have them attack all at once when there's more than one? In Frontier, it's like they're queuing up to attack! You beat one, accelerate time and immediately get another 'you're under attack' message. It would be a lot more fun if you had to duke it out with them all at once and make the battle a lot tougher, especially with the current weak AI. It'd be great if Braben can introduce some AI similar to some flight-sims, where once an enemy gets on your tail, it's very hard to shake them off and jumping out of the system might actually be a better option than staying to try and win a fight that is probably going to get you killed.
Ok, that's all I can think of right now, I hope I haven't repeated anything that someone else has said!
