So, the way I end up mostly playing Elite is speccing out ships, testing them, and making little "fleets" for myself. Once I have a lineup I love, I swap 'em all out for something else, to see if I can come up with a better combo.
What if Frontier turned that into an in-game mission type? You go to the mission board (in a system that has a shipyard), and there’s an NPC wanting to contract a veteran CMDR to soup up the NPC's new Viper Mk III, or whatever they have. Higher-end missions could involve multiple ships even; "Spec out a fleet for faction X".
How would that work?
Here’s how it could work: When you’re offered the mission, the client tells you what they're going to use the ship for - maybe some just want a personal ship for travel, some are miners, traders, bounty hunters, scientists, taxi drivers; or if you get in with the wrong sort, you get requests from smugglers or pirates; or maybe for the right sort of wrong, revolutionaries - along with a chance at some random flavor requirements, “My aim is bad, so I want gimbaled weapons” or “I travel a lot, so I'll need a fuel scoop too”.
When you accept the mission, you pay the client a “deposit” for the cost of the ship you’re taking on, the same as when you buy a new ship. And just like when you buy a new ship, the game puts you into it and stores your old one. The mission expires in, say two weeks, and you can only have one mission of this type at a time.
Then… you just do your thing. You take the ship around and load it out for what you think is a good loadout for their requirements, you engineer it, you set up power management and fire groups, you take it out for some test runs and see how it performs, maybe swapping up loadouts or fine tuning your engineering. As much flying is involved as you want there to be, as long as you feel confident your CMDR is delivering their best work.
What about speccing fleets?
Corporate or government clients would want whole fleets, needing multiple ship turn-ins, with different ships serving different roles, and also have a maximum overall budget they’ll allow. A client asking for a miner fleet, for instance, might want a big container ship-type with just lots of cargo space, a smaller cargo ship-type to keep the miners stocked up on limpets and keep their holds flowing into the big boys, the actual mining ship-type, and an escort ship-type for protection. A combat fleet will want a big heavy type, a medium type, a smaller interceptor-style type, and maybe a tender with repair limpets. When you’re speccing a fleet for a client, no engineering is allowed on parts installed on that ship, and no engineered parts can be installed: You’re just speccing reference models for their desk-jockeys to mass-purchase later.
Fleet missions would also have their own flavor requirements: “We’re with the Federation, so at least 3 of these four ships need to be Core Dynamics, we don’t want to have to re-train our maintenance guys” or “We get a discount on bulk purchases of multi-cannons, so most of the weapons should be multis”, that sort of thing.
Completing the mission
When you turn in the mission to complete it, you sell the ship back to the client. As long as the ship meets the basic loadout requirements set forth (a miner must have a refinery, etc), it works (hardpoints can deploy without the ship shutting down, engine still works if the power plant is shot out), and is within the given budget (if there is one) the game lets you complete the mission. Completing it either puts you in a different ship you own that’s at that station, or puts you back into a basic Sidewinder if you don’t have anything currently there.
The reward is the original cost of the ship that you fronted at the start, the cost of parts you put into it, plus some extra on top, which can vary a bit depending on how “exotic” you make the ship: The more engineering you do on the parts, the more guardian tech you stuff in, the more experimental weapons, if you set all five levels of power management, the more profit you get in the end.
Give the mission type a week cooldown or something, so it can’t be lazily spammed (clients get suspicious if your turnaround time is too fast), and… boom. Fun new mission type for ship nerds like myself.
The overall financial reward doesn’t even need to be massive; for the players who actually do it the "right" way, we'll earn plenty of rewards in-game just testing our designs.
But that’s not all...
If Frontier wanted to, they could use the data generated from these missions - CMDR submitted ships specced for a given role - to generate the NPC ships we all see. I have no doubt whatever database stores those NPC types has some sort of "role" metadata or something, so the returned mission data for requested roles could eventually, after an approval process (that could be in good part scripted to ensure the spec was "real" and not gamebreaking for an NPC), be used to spawn NPC’s. You’d have user generated (even if it takes a month or so to approve/filter the data) NPC fleets, and NPC's who automatically keep up with the current metas; because there's enough of us nerds out here who will happily volunteer to keep Elite’s NPCs current on latest metas, even if it wasn’t gameified.
Could even theoretically tie the BGS into it, maybe. “Fleet” missions would have a target budget, so have NPC ships for a given system spawn based on a rating (low, medium, high) tied to the economic state of a given system. Then generate "build a fleet" missions that have a target price to whatever "quality" NPC ships should spawn in, based on system security levels.
Poorer regions could become more dangerous, as would be expected, as high security would have better-equipped police units. PvE pirate CMDR's could be naturally attracted to more backwater systems, where the pickings are easier, making visiting them more adventurous for not PvP-expecting CMDR's.
There would need to be manual approval on Frontier’s end, before incorporating new NPC builds into the game, but even if they only approved a few new NPC types a month, that’s still a pretty cool in-game result that everyone would see - and would really do a lot to freshen up the NPC’s we all see - especially for faction-aligned governments.
What if Frontier turned that into an in-game mission type? You go to the mission board (in a system that has a shipyard), and there’s an NPC wanting to contract a veteran CMDR to soup up the NPC's new Viper Mk III, or whatever they have. Higher-end missions could involve multiple ships even; "Spec out a fleet for faction X".
How would that work?
Here’s how it could work: When you’re offered the mission, the client tells you what they're going to use the ship for - maybe some just want a personal ship for travel, some are miners, traders, bounty hunters, scientists, taxi drivers; or if you get in with the wrong sort, you get requests from smugglers or pirates; or maybe for the right sort of wrong, revolutionaries - along with a chance at some random flavor requirements, “My aim is bad, so I want gimbaled weapons” or “I travel a lot, so I'll need a fuel scoop too”.
When you accept the mission, you pay the client a “deposit” for the cost of the ship you’re taking on, the same as when you buy a new ship. And just like when you buy a new ship, the game puts you into it and stores your old one. The mission expires in, say two weeks, and you can only have one mission of this type at a time.
Then… you just do your thing. You take the ship around and load it out for what you think is a good loadout for their requirements, you engineer it, you set up power management and fire groups, you take it out for some test runs and see how it performs, maybe swapping up loadouts or fine tuning your engineering. As much flying is involved as you want there to be, as long as you feel confident your CMDR is delivering their best work.
What about speccing fleets?
Corporate or government clients would want whole fleets, needing multiple ship turn-ins, with different ships serving different roles, and also have a maximum overall budget they’ll allow. A client asking for a miner fleet, for instance, might want a big container ship-type with just lots of cargo space, a smaller cargo ship-type to keep the miners stocked up on limpets and keep their holds flowing into the big boys, the actual mining ship-type, and an escort ship-type for protection. A combat fleet will want a big heavy type, a medium type, a smaller interceptor-style type, and maybe a tender with repair limpets. When you’re speccing a fleet for a client, no engineering is allowed on parts installed on that ship, and no engineered parts can be installed: You’re just speccing reference models for their desk-jockeys to mass-purchase later.
Fleet missions would also have their own flavor requirements: “We’re with the Federation, so at least 3 of these four ships need to be Core Dynamics, we don’t want to have to re-train our maintenance guys” or “We get a discount on bulk purchases of multi-cannons, so most of the weapons should be multis”, that sort of thing.
Completing the mission
When you turn in the mission to complete it, you sell the ship back to the client. As long as the ship meets the basic loadout requirements set forth (a miner must have a refinery, etc), it works (hardpoints can deploy without the ship shutting down, engine still works if the power plant is shot out), and is within the given budget (if there is one) the game lets you complete the mission. Completing it either puts you in a different ship you own that’s at that station, or puts you back into a basic Sidewinder if you don’t have anything currently there.
The reward is the original cost of the ship that you fronted at the start, the cost of parts you put into it, plus some extra on top, which can vary a bit depending on how “exotic” you make the ship: The more engineering you do on the parts, the more guardian tech you stuff in, the more experimental weapons, if you set all five levels of power management, the more profit you get in the end.
Give the mission type a week cooldown or something, so it can’t be lazily spammed (clients get suspicious if your turnaround time is too fast), and… boom. Fun new mission type for ship nerds like myself.
The overall financial reward doesn’t even need to be massive; for the players who actually do it the "right" way, we'll earn plenty of rewards in-game just testing our designs.
But that’s not all...
If Frontier wanted to, they could use the data generated from these missions - CMDR submitted ships specced for a given role - to generate the NPC ships we all see. I have no doubt whatever database stores those NPC types has some sort of "role" metadata or something, so the returned mission data for requested roles could eventually, after an approval process (that could be in good part scripted to ensure the spec was "real" and not gamebreaking for an NPC), be used to spawn NPC’s. You’d have user generated (even if it takes a month or so to approve/filter the data) NPC fleets, and NPC's who automatically keep up with the current metas; because there's enough of us nerds out here who will happily volunteer to keep Elite’s NPCs current on latest metas, even if it wasn’t gameified.
Could even theoretically tie the BGS into it, maybe. “Fleet” missions would have a target budget, so have NPC ships for a given system spawn based on a rating (low, medium, high) tied to the economic state of a given system. Then generate "build a fleet" missions that have a target price to whatever "quality" NPC ships should spawn in, based on system security levels.
Poorer regions could become more dangerous, as would be expected, as high security would have better-equipped police units. PvE pirate CMDR's could be naturally attracted to more backwater systems, where the pickings are easier, making visiting them more adventurous for not PvP-expecting CMDR's.
There would need to be manual approval on Frontier’s end, before incorporating new NPC builds into the game, but even if they only approved a few new NPC types a month, that’s still a pretty cool in-game result that everyone would see - and would really do a lot to freshen up the NPC’s we all see - especially for faction-aligned governments.
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