Strom ! You are indeed a very stubborn person, but i am too. The rp application you are talking about already exists and is called a special rp request. When you want to pirate in a liberty cruiser, you need your story to be approved by admin. Why ? Because there is a rule which states that when a ship is red for an id on the ship and id chart, you need to have your story approved to get the ship. And the liberty navy is RED on the chart for all pirate factions. You said "Liberty Cruiser was hijacked by my Independat Hacker and his crew ... Without somebody to police the stories, the problem will just continue unchecked". The story of a Hacker stealing a Liberty cruiser would need to be admin approved one way or another, this is a rule. So what problem would continue ? Special rp stories are already policed.
No, what i am talking about is to force people to write an unchecked rp story to get a capship, but a capship corresponding to their id. That means that even if your capship is built by your faction, you'd have to write a story anyway. Please read my post better before replying next time.
Now, let's talk about the ships themselves. As you seem to like definitions, i'll define standard for you : Widely recognized or employed as a model of authority or excellence ; normal, familiar, or usual ; commonly used or supplied. That means that any line of ship often used and seen in Liberty is is a standard liberty ship. That gives us : Patriot and derivatives, Defender and derivatives, liberty gunboat, liberty cruiser, liberty dreadnought. The liberty assault battlecruiser is already less standard, even if it is smaller than the dreadnought, because it is supposed to be a secret attack weapon.
You are confusing the notions of power and standardness. A powerful ship like the liberty dreadnought can be standard, while a weaker ship like the scorpion gunboat can be rare. I can prove it with irl examples, let's take the russian navy : the sovremenny class destroyer is a large, powerful, and STANDARD warship, as it is produced and exportated in large numbers. The much smaller, weaker bora missile boat is not standard, because only two were built.
The characters now : you said "You control the character, who controls multiple ships". No, this is not true. You roleplay a character who controls his ship, but the only thing that represents you ingame is your ship, like it or not. This is a spaceship game before all the rest, not a fps. Also, why would you roleplay only one character with multiple ships ? Are you saying that players should have all their ships under one faction ? Because i can hardly imagine a corsair character flying both a titan and a storta...
Finally, let's talk about diversity. You wrote "What I said was not contradictory, because a special ship is not special if everybody has it. If everybody is flying capital ships and bombers, there is very little diversity. But if people are flying everything from starfleas to dreadnoughts, now that's diversity". You made the same mistake here. You are confusing the class of the ships with their diversity. If everbody flies capships and bombers, then yes, there is still diversity. There is five classes of capital ships, and each major power has at least 3 of these classes. And there is nearly 30 different bombers. And you forgot all the freighters and transports. Indeed, fighters increase diversity, but diversity will always be present as long as people fly ships from different factions, whatever their class may be. I think that you are only allergic to bombers and battleships, which is sometimes understandable.
