I mean my ideal solution would be to have point defense cannons on capital ships that have a low chance to shoot down incoming an incoming missile every few seconds and also smack errant snubs for not having the requisite brain cells to rub together in order to avoid strafing a battleship but this is Freelancer and we make do with what we can
Go get some friends to do battleship missions with because you don't roll up into Molten Core on your own and whine to Blizzard that the first pack of mobs you encountered just turned you into paste
e: if you want one of my standard long form effortposts on why a thing is the way it is I'mma need somewhere to put it and probably a walk with a notepad to go figure out exactly how I want to word it
"Go get some friends to do battleship missions with because you don't roll up into Molten Core on your own and whine to Blizzard that the first pack of mobs you encountered just turned you into paste"
@Kazinsal like me and others have said before - doing missions with multiple people offers very little gain in return for the time invested. Compare it to trading:
For trading you need a startup of 150mil for a 5k-er and initial loads. With this you can gain up to an average of 100mil/hr
For missions you need a heavy battleship, weapons and at least cau7, so around 1 bil minimum; when doing missions you gain up to what? 60-70mil/hr? You will need very specific missions and extreme luck to get the exact random spawns needed to go over 70mil/hr. Now say you wanna speed things up and do them with friends. The logic would be that you have increased gain, but you don't. This is because of the amount of credit cards battleships drop and the fact that mission bounties are split with group members.
Missions simply do not reach the same profit as trading, even tho its arguable that players doing missions generates more activity, pvp and rp than afk trading on autopilot and avoiding pirates. In the same time there are a lot of people that simply dont wanna do trading because of how boring it is and would rather shoot things.