Hi, I've been looking for years for a hard game that has a really tough death penalty, preferably permanent! I want a first person type sim where you control your own ship so really didnt like eve. I used to play freelancer with ioncross mod made by one of the developers that stripped you of most of your stuff when you did which was great! and would relish finding an updated version of that. I just don't have the time or money to check out all the games there are... any ideas?
X-Wing
Pulsar has crew permadeath http://pulsarthegame.com/ game still in Alpha so a lot of the features have still to be added.
FTL http://www.ftlgame.com/ would be another but it's 2D
X3TC onwards have permadeath mode (Dead is Dead), it may suit your taste very well.
Also, Transcedence, Flatspace series (both aren't first person).
Should be simple enough to use flhook to set up a pretty severe death penalty in Freelancer multi.
I know that Frontier : Elite 2 and Frontier : First Encounters both had an instant "game over" when your ship was destroyed without having an escape pod - I don't recall if you got the same ship or something like the starting ship back with the escape pod though.