Could crewmembers be made manditory? Possibly link the crewmember item to the radar. It would be sort of the way that the id works as the tractor beam. The radar would not work unless there was a copilot on board. The point would be that if your ship gets destroyed, you lose the copilot and have to buy a new one. Your radar would not work unless you buy a new copilot and the person who made the kill can tractor the copilot and sell it. Admittedly, i do not know if this is even possible to do.
Tradeships would not need one or would be real cheap.
Fighter and bomber copilots would be cheap 20k
Gunboat would be around 100k
Cruiser and destroyers 2 mil or so
BS would be around 10 mil
Maybe even have them get bought back for half what they are sold for, like weapons.
Not only would this cause more of a penalty to dying, but also more of a risk when flying cap ships. If you want to fly that BS everywhere, you would be risking 10 mil.
It would be great if you could only buy the copilot from the faction you belong to. It would have to match your id. Then if you died, you would have to go back to one of your bases to get a new one. You would essentialy have to leave the system you died in unless it was your home base.
This is probably to much work to be feesible, just thought this might be a way to discourage cap ship whoring which people on the forums seem to complain about.
when its a lootable item, its an incentive to pvp without much RP. - cause you don t only get the kill but also an item you can sell for a lot. ( thats the only concern i have about a lootable item on ships )
If it were possable I would say make copilot sell price 10.ooo or less,
so pepole not just killing you for copilot and Trader copilot buy price should be 10 MILL, that Might cut down on traders saying
"so just kill me I LOSE Nothing haha- OWWW BOUNTY hunter kill the bad pirate" IF that is...
Having people just killing for the lootable item could cause RP problems. It would probably be best for the sell back price to be for less. Maybe a lot less. A lot lot less, like 1/10th the buy price. Weapons sell back for a lot less. The point was to discourage out of rp killing and cap ship whoring by adding a penalty to death. The person hunting for copilots would also be risking losing his. Best of all worlds would be that only enemy bases bought back copilots for 1/10th, everywhere else it would be for 1$ or not at all. This could encourage RP hunting. LFs, HFs, and small trade ships would be exempt, since lowbies that could not afford copilots fly those.
The thought they should only be able to buy copilots from same faction bases came from hearing an admin tell Corsairs to leave NY space because it was out of RP. It seemed the admins did not want people to travel far from their ID faction's zone of influence. With this, the farther you travel from home, if you dock far away, the farther you would have to travel back. You are suppose to leave the system you died in anyway. Maybe ally bases could also sell the copilots: ie. liberty rogues would also sell outcast copilots. Or perhaps more simple, there could just be a real steep rep requirement to buy them, like the IDs.
If the problem is that you can't fly far without radar, then maybe no copilot means radar is very minimal. A disco scanner would only have 500 radius. Maybe the copilot could be linked to the tractor same as the ID (a copilot for the radar just seemed logical). Hell, maybe just make IDs lootable (this would not do anything for cap ship whoring though).
Granted, it would be great if everyone followed the rules and played like good RPers, but if that is not the case, this idea might help.
My main concern is if it would be worth the effort involved to implement. Wish I knew how to do it. Seems like a lot of work. It is amazing that you modders have put forth this much effort to make such a fun mod already.