I love the security authorisation mechanic. I love the idea of flipping your scanner into illegal mode. I love the gameplay element it adds. It's slick, it's simple, and it feels different enough to be interesting. It's a great idea, and really well implemented. Excellent job, guys.
Like a lot of Elite's great ideas, though, it only seems to exist within the specific niche it was created for. I think it would be great to see the game take the idea and run with it, and create a little more cohesiveness between the different branches of Elite in the process.
Reputation
The space game already has a mechanic where we can gain and lose reputation with a given faction, all the way up to Allied. Right now, that mostly just unlocks better-paying missions, but what if it had a role to play in Odyssey as well? Since achieving Allied status takes a reasonable amount of time/effort, perhaps achieving that means that if you rock up at one of the faction's settlements, you're recognised as a friend and welcomed inside. Perhaps this mechanic is triggered when one of the guards scans you (ie. checks your ID) and recognises you as an ally? Keeping with the narrative theme of this, perhaps being recognised as Allied means that, that guard initially scans you, none of the others will. After all, they don't go around scanning all the regular citizens on the Settlement, and if you're an ally, there's no need to keep scanning you too, right?
This would be a big game-changer. For idiots like me, it means I'm much less likely to get shot at because I accidentally ran away from a guard while bunny-hopping across the settlement. For more nefarious individuals, however, it makes it easier to move around doing crime. Presumably, the guards will still get angry if they catch you stealing something or find you somewhere you're not supposed to be, but as long as you're covert, as long as you manage to clone someone's profile without getting spotted, it will take a lot of the pressure off. It's potentially a self-balancing mechanic as well: for players who are just looking to rush their way through a settlement as quickly as possible, getting to Allied status for every minor faction before you go to their base is a lot of effort. But, for players who haven't got the hang of the illegality mechanics yet, or who just struggle with that kind of gameplay in general, it provides a way to put in some extra effort and make life easier for yourself.
Faction Rank
Another game mechanic that's very much in its own niche are the Federal and Imperial ranks. I know a lot of people were/are hoping that Odyssey would somehow factor those in. Perhaps settlement security is a fairly subtle/easy way of achieving that? Faction Rank already provides permit unlocks, so perhaps at a given rank, a Commander automatically gets Level 1 access at settlements that are allied with that major faction. Narratively, the idea would be that you are flashing your military ID, and as a result people are a little more willing to let you wander about the place because you're an "authority figure". If I remember right, Level 1 access doesn't unlock too much (you can get into some areas you otherwise couldn't, but it's not like it gives you access to all the locker passwords or anything), so it is more of a flavour feature than a real benefit.
(An important balancing element to bear in mind would be that most people who advance their Federal/Imperial rank advance it by quite a long way because of the ship unlock incentives. Having Level 1 access at a low rank and then Level 2 access at a higher rank would probably be too powerful, because too many Commanders would be incentivised to grind that out.)
Credentials in Advance
On some missions, you show up with security credentials in advance. It makes sense - a mission-giver can't expect you to succeed in a task if you aren't allowed through the relevant doors - but it also means that it's possible for a stranger to show up on a planet and for some reason have all the passwords. It feels like there's room for some illegality there.
What if when you scan someone for their security profile, there is an option to "save" that data, turning it into a data item in your Commander's backpack? These scans are (relatively) easy to obtain, but collect enough of them from the same faction, and someone (the barkeep?) might be able to cross-reference whatever patterns and encryptions are there, and put together a fake ID that you can then activate from your backpack or your gear wheel or something like that. Having been put together by a professional, it's more convincing than whatever your Profile Analyser can cobble together on the fly, but it shouldn't be 100% effective: perhaps every time a guard scans you, a mechanic similar to the "I want more money" bartering mechanic kicks off, taking into account your Mercenary rank. If it succeeds, they don't notice anything suspicious about you or what you are carrying; if it fails, you get shot at. You still want to avoid the guards, because the more times you're scanned the more chances there are for the credentials to be recognised as fake, but it would provide a little bit of breathing room for people who aren't good at or don't enjoy Odyssey's particular brand of stealth mechanics.
Like with Reputation, I think this could end up being a self-balancing mechanic: it takes effort to gather the scans and combine them together into a fake ID for the right faction in advance, so for players with better gear and greater skill it's probably not worth the effort; but for lower-end folks, it might be worth the effort if they'd otherwise be put off this type of gameplay.
Ship Transponders
A common trope in science fiction is the idea of changing the transponder on your spaceship so that you look like a different one. It's the fast-paced alternative to getting a respray on your car: great for avoiding notice when you're sneaking in, and great for slipping away when you're rushing out. Since Odyssey establishes a very similar mechanic for cloning the credentials on foot, it could be really fun to see this folded back into the space game as well. Using a false transponder would presumably affect the behaviour of AI towards you (since AI pirates are smart enough not to attack their allies), and might even fool players for a little while, depending how it works. It shouldn't be absolutely flawless - perhaps only effective up until a particular range? - but it could have a lot of fun applications. Flying around in an unshielded Type 9? Throw up a fake transponder, and slip by the AI commanders that are waiting to interdict you. About to get refused services at a space station because of all the bounties on you? Scan one of the ships outside, and sneak in under their credentials, so that you can get the fuel/repairs you need. Smuggling cargo? Maybe scan one of the military ships in the area, and sneak past the station's automated defenses without getting scanned.
One option would be to add a utility module that allows you to scan ships for their "profile", and use it temporarily. This would be the closest equivalent to the Profile Analyser, and there's a balance aspect to it as well: you need to make room in your build to install it, perhaps you need to get close enough to the ship you're cloning to scan it, etc. That's going to make it a lot harder to copy a hostile ship (unless you're able to engineer it for range, etc), which might be a good thing. However, it makes it a purely space game mechanic.
An alternative would be to have this be something you need to complete an Odyssey activity to obtain. Perhaps instead of a scanner, the fake transponder is more like a heat sink. It's something you can create on your ship via synthesis, but instead of Horizons engineering materials, perhaps you're using data that can only be looted from Odyssey settlements. After all, ships land at those settlements all the time, so downloading some seemingly benign flight logs or comm records that you can then comb through to strip out the transponder codes of ships that have landed there seems fairly plausible. That way, it isn't just taking a mechanic from Odyssey and incorporating it into the space game, it's an opportunity for the things we do in Odyssey to directly affect and impact other aspects of the game.
Also, while it doesn't directly relate to the Profile Analyser mechanic, this would be another great opportunity to give Federal and Imperial ranks a little more functionality. Something akin to "Diplomatic Immunity" for individuals above a certain rank might be a nice feature. Smuggling isn't a particularly lucrative aspect of the game, but having an easier time smuggling Imperial Slaves because you're a Baron and stations are "less inclined" to scan you while landing feels like a plausible mechanic, and it would be nice to see some tangible rewards in between the ship unlocks and system permits.
These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, they're not particularly refined or workshopped, but the gist of it is this: take some of the concepts you already have, and spread them elsewhere. I think it would make a huge difference to the feel of the game, particularly when it comes to the current gameplay loops feeling disconnected from each other. Swiping someone's log-in details shouldn't just be something you do on one particular kind of Odyssey mission, the game/world will feel fuller if these familiar mechanics show up in more places.
Like a lot of Elite's great ideas, though, it only seems to exist within the specific niche it was created for. I think it would be great to see the game take the idea and run with it, and create a little more cohesiveness between the different branches of Elite in the process.
Reputation
The space game already has a mechanic where we can gain and lose reputation with a given faction, all the way up to Allied. Right now, that mostly just unlocks better-paying missions, but what if it had a role to play in Odyssey as well? Since achieving Allied status takes a reasonable amount of time/effort, perhaps achieving that means that if you rock up at one of the faction's settlements, you're recognised as a friend and welcomed inside. Perhaps this mechanic is triggered when one of the guards scans you (ie. checks your ID) and recognises you as an ally? Keeping with the narrative theme of this, perhaps being recognised as Allied means that, that guard initially scans you, none of the others will. After all, they don't go around scanning all the regular citizens on the Settlement, and if you're an ally, there's no need to keep scanning you too, right?
This would be a big game-changer. For idiots like me, it means I'm much less likely to get shot at because I accidentally ran away from a guard while bunny-hopping across the settlement. For more nefarious individuals, however, it makes it easier to move around doing crime. Presumably, the guards will still get angry if they catch you stealing something or find you somewhere you're not supposed to be, but as long as you're covert, as long as you manage to clone someone's profile without getting spotted, it will take a lot of the pressure off. It's potentially a self-balancing mechanic as well: for players who are just looking to rush their way through a settlement as quickly as possible, getting to Allied status for every minor faction before you go to their base is a lot of effort. But, for players who haven't got the hang of the illegality mechanics yet, or who just struggle with that kind of gameplay in general, it provides a way to put in some extra effort and make life easier for yourself.
Faction Rank
Another game mechanic that's very much in its own niche are the Federal and Imperial ranks. I know a lot of people were/are hoping that Odyssey would somehow factor those in. Perhaps settlement security is a fairly subtle/easy way of achieving that? Faction Rank already provides permit unlocks, so perhaps at a given rank, a Commander automatically gets Level 1 access at settlements that are allied with that major faction. Narratively, the idea would be that you are flashing your military ID, and as a result people are a little more willing to let you wander about the place because you're an "authority figure". If I remember right, Level 1 access doesn't unlock too much (you can get into some areas you otherwise couldn't, but it's not like it gives you access to all the locker passwords or anything), so it is more of a flavour feature than a real benefit.
(An important balancing element to bear in mind would be that most people who advance their Federal/Imperial rank advance it by quite a long way because of the ship unlock incentives. Having Level 1 access at a low rank and then Level 2 access at a higher rank would probably be too powerful, because too many Commanders would be incentivised to grind that out.)
Credentials in Advance
On some missions, you show up with security credentials in advance. It makes sense - a mission-giver can't expect you to succeed in a task if you aren't allowed through the relevant doors - but it also means that it's possible for a stranger to show up on a planet and for some reason have all the passwords. It feels like there's room for some illegality there.
What if when you scan someone for their security profile, there is an option to "save" that data, turning it into a data item in your Commander's backpack? These scans are (relatively) easy to obtain, but collect enough of them from the same faction, and someone (the barkeep?) might be able to cross-reference whatever patterns and encryptions are there, and put together a fake ID that you can then activate from your backpack or your gear wheel or something like that. Having been put together by a professional, it's more convincing than whatever your Profile Analyser can cobble together on the fly, but it shouldn't be 100% effective: perhaps every time a guard scans you, a mechanic similar to the "I want more money" bartering mechanic kicks off, taking into account your Mercenary rank. If it succeeds, they don't notice anything suspicious about you or what you are carrying; if it fails, you get shot at. You still want to avoid the guards, because the more times you're scanned the more chances there are for the credentials to be recognised as fake, but it would provide a little bit of breathing room for people who aren't good at or don't enjoy Odyssey's particular brand of stealth mechanics.
Like with Reputation, I think this could end up being a self-balancing mechanic: it takes effort to gather the scans and combine them together into a fake ID for the right faction in advance, so for players with better gear and greater skill it's probably not worth the effort; but for lower-end folks, it might be worth the effort if they'd otherwise be put off this type of gameplay.
Ship Transponders
A common trope in science fiction is the idea of changing the transponder on your spaceship so that you look like a different one. It's the fast-paced alternative to getting a respray on your car: great for avoiding notice when you're sneaking in, and great for slipping away when you're rushing out. Since Odyssey establishes a very similar mechanic for cloning the credentials on foot, it could be really fun to see this folded back into the space game as well. Using a false transponder would presumably affect the behaviour of AI towards you (since AI pirates are smart enough not to attack their allies), and might even fool players for a little while, depending how it works. It shouldn't be absolutely flawless - perhaps only effective up until a particular range? - but it could have a lot of fun applications. Flying around in an unshielded Type 9? Throw up a fake transponder, and slip by the AI commanders that are waiting to interdict you. About to get refused services at a space station because of all the bounties on you? Scan one of the ships outside, and sneak in under their credentials, so that you can get the fuel/repairs you need. Smuggling cargo? Maybe scan one of the military ships in the area, and sneak past the station's automated defenses without getting scanned.
One option would be to add a utility module that allows you to scan ships for their "profile", and use it temporarily. This would be the closest equivalent to the Profile Analyser, and there's a balance aspect to it as well: you need to make room in your build to install it, perhaps you need to get close enough to the ship you're cloning to scan it, etc. That's going to make it a lot harder to copy a hostile ship (unless you're able to engineer it for range, etc), which might be a good thing. However, it makes it a purely space game mechanic.
An alternative would be to have this be something you need to complete an Odyssey activity to obtain. Perhaps instead of a scanner, the fake transponder is more like a heat sink. It's something you can create on your ship via synthesis, but instead of Horizons engineering materials, perhaps you're using data that can only be looted from Odyssey settlements. After all, ships land at those settlements all the time, so downloading some seemingly benign flight logs or comm records that you can then comb through to strip out the transponder codes of ships that have landed there seems fairly plausible. That way, it isn't just taking a mechanic from Odyssey and incorporating it into the space game, it's an opportunity for the things we do in Odyssey to directly affect and impact other aspects of the game.
Also, while it doesn't directly relate to the Profile Analyser mechanic, this would be another great opportunity to give Federal and Imperial ranks a little more functionality. Something akin to "Diplomatic Immunity" for individuals above a certain rank might be a nice feature. Smuggling isn't a particularly lucrative aspect of the game, but having an easier time smuggling Imperial Slaves because you're a Baron and stations are "less inclined" to scan you while landing feels like a plausible mechanic, and it would be nice to see some tangible rewards in between the ship unlocks and system permits.
These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, they're not particularly refined or workshopped, but the gist of it is this: take some of the concepts you already have, and spread them elsewhere. I think it would make a huge difference to the feel of the game, particularly when it comes to the current gameplay loops feeling disconnected from each other. Swiping someone's log-in details shouldn't just be something you do on one particular kind of Odyssey mission, the game/world will feel fuller if these familiar mechanics show up in more places.
