How about we get a chance to try a new ship before we buy it?
You could choose any loadout you wanted. Then you pay 10% non-refundable deposit and it's yours for 1 hours game-time.
- You cannot commit crimes in it (if you do, your Thrusters get automatically disabled and the most powerful ATR wing spawns instantly to destroy you - the rebuy cost is doubled and on you).
- If you don't return it on time, see above
- Upon returning the ship you have a choice of keeping the ship and paying the remaining 90% of it's value or return it and lose 10% deposit.
I would like to see a better unlock system for "all" ships.
The idea is that you start out with 1 ship available to you
Sidewinder
Now you have to take a pilot course to unlock a ship, for example, you want to unlock Eagle, You have to take on a multi part mission, where you will be loaned an Eagle, and have some scripted cutscenes where you can learn about the Eagle, and if you are impatient, just space out (hit space bar) and get on with completing the missions and as end reward you are now allowed to buy an Eagle.
The missions you need to complete can be any of Exploration, Trading/Passenger and Combat. And you need to complete enough of these ship specific missions until you have earned enough points to unlock the ship. Sop say you are doing unlocking the Vulture, which is a pretty heavy Fighter. So you will get more points for doing combat missions instead of trading/passenger or exploration missions. But it should be possible to unlock all ships by doing only combat, only trading/passengers or exploration missions.
And if you want to unlock Viper, you have to unlock the Eagle first.
And if you want the Type 9, you have to unlock Hauler, Type 6 and Type 7
And when we get to the more multi purpose ships, it gets messy... Well they with Adder and then we it could be something like Cobra, Asp, Python, Anaconda.
And it could also be that to unlock the adder, you must unlock Eagle and Hauler first.
To get these missions, you have to get a to station that sells them, and when you do these mission, you are always put into a "solo" instance. So you cannot get help from your friends or ganked by gankers. You accept the mission and you now have an option to activate the mission, when you do, you are put into you mission ship, well, tele presence (think how multicrew works), and you do not have any rebuy costs, doing illegal things, like killing innocent fails the mission etc, etc, while this mission is active, you are unable to take other mission, complete other mission etc, as instancing goes, you are always doing this in your own instance, so no other players around. Think about this as simulated training. And also, no pesky NPC after you, you are not wanted etc, etc, while in doing this missions.
You will also have a fully unlocked outfitting at your disposal, even with some option to engineer module (everything available and unlocked), and even if it is tempting, to max out a ship, the more you outfit your ship with better modules (well anything except the E-rated modules, weapons excluded) and engineered modules, you will get less points than if you leave the ship e-rated, so make it easier but have to do more missions, or make it harder, and only need to do a few missions.
And once unlocked, you have access to this outfitting, testing whenever you visit a star port. So you can play "what if" with your builds without spending all that time engineering a ship, just to realise that it does not work as you expected. The testing in this mode is fairly limited. But you are put in a location where there is a permanent war (=Conflict zones), one of each Resource extraction sites for pirate hunting, etc, etc.
So the idea is to give us the option to learn and test the ships before we buy them! And also learn about the lore, and these ships history. Also all of the cut scenes should once unlocked be viewed/listened whenever you like.
