"Role-play oriented cargo" with an in-game additional perk purpose

[nOmnomnOm]

So from @Xoria 's thread here: http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=136310
And also from the game called "Faster than light" and "Fractured Space", I got an idea for something that would be quite neat to do.

This idea would need to have a plugin for it or whatever dark magic the devs do.
The concept of the idea is to not only have some nice looking cargo with an info card on it that would help in your RP for other players to see but also provide the player with some perk for game-play when he has this commodity.

Let's say you want to have a medical unit commodity that Xoria was thinking of adding. For now as an idea, this will just be in honest terms just sitting on your cargo and will be useful for OTHERS to scan your ship and say "oh hey that is a medic crew. must be something to do with his/her RP!" .

But what if that medical unit did something else for your ship for game play.

For example... Lets say that all human cargo would now have a slow decay rate and this would be because of long exposures to disease, radiation, etc etc that could have your passengers slowly get sick and die off. BUT with a medical crew, you could have them alive permanently!

Now i know what you are thinking. Why should we add this idea if we can just not have this decay problem.
Well this idea only works when you have a lot of selection to choose from!

You could have things like: Engineer, Medic, Pilot, Gunman, etc. All these guys would have something that your ship could get buffed for.
And the trick here is that you can just have ONE of these guys added into a slot on your ship.

SO

Medic: Removes the decay rate of human cargo.

Pilot: Gives a boost perhaps faster cruise/thrust.

Navigator: Gives a boost to radar distance (and maybe can detect cloak if close enough?)

Engineer: Gives a boost to turn speed of the ship but scanning is lower.

Gunman: Gives a boost to gun damage but suffers in turn speed (or scanning).

There can also be a crew set for things like cloaking, jumping, speed of cruise, cargo size, armor boost etc.
Each one would have some sort of buff and maybe to make it balanced something else would be sacrificed.

This would make things a whole lot more interesting in terms of customizing your ship to what you want to do. Not only will this give the player the commodity they want to RP with but also give it a purpose for gameplay.
As you can see, since you can choose just one team it is like choosing a class to play as with it's own unique set up in buffs. Because there are so many options they then help to balance the perks against each other since if you can have one thing you cannot have something else.

I hope this explanation is sufficient to get some discussion going on. I understand this probably cannot be implemented into disco... or can it?

Let me know what you think.

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