I'm not wild about limitting stuff to guilds. If you need to be in a player-run faction to get a battleship then we wind up with the "old boys club". If it's one battleship per faction then it becomes even more of a popularity contest. Nuts to that.
I like your physical idea for battleships, though. The monsterous shields on player capships/transports has bugged me since the first day I installed the mod.
Re: blunt vs monk... Agree with blunt. There's a reason nobody has built a battleship since before WWII. Not just bombers, but ordinance in general (rocketry is a big one) has badly surpassed armour technology at sea. In the olden days battleships didn't need protection; they WERE the protection. I guess the question is, what erra does a Freelancer battleship fit into? Is it the monster that takes point and shrugs off everything the enemy throws at it? Or is it the bombardment tool that hides behind a screen of defenders? (If it's the bombardment tool then it doesn't really has no practical use in the hands of players)
