Actually this is a really good idea Marcel! 🙂 But, I think you could go even further. You could set a starting option (call it hard difficulty or something) where you start the game without a ship and have to work your way up to having your own. As for a fall back option if your broke, it sure beats buying a Lifter and dumping junk in the outskirts of the solar system you are in to make a few creds. I had to do this on a few occasions in Frontier when the repairs to my ship were too expensive for my bank balance. 😳

Never mind captain; how about turret gunner?

Great idea! So your first owned ship will be something like this interplanetary shuttle then. I always liked the idea of not being able to leave your homesystem in the first few hours of the game before stepping out in infinite space!

Correct! Let em earn the right to fly a ship. Maybe there should be a pilot's test too on the hardcore difficulty setting were there is no auto pilot and you have to manually land, dock and hyperspace to another system to get your ticket to fly. The Pilot's License could be your first achievement, of course this achievement is only available if you select the hardcore starting position 🙂 A Cobra Mk1 with L plates! 😆

Please, that's like handing an SUV to a beginner. I'd put them into an Adder; the insurance should be cheaper, for a start.

Mmmmmm, you might have a point there Brianetta, maybe the Cobbie Mk1 is a bit on the big side. Maybe the game needs a small training ship? I know Gernot created some great models that could serve this purpose well. Would be funny though if it could be textured with L plates. Mind you, what do they use in other countries to denote a learner in charge of a vehicle? Perhaps there could be a better option instead of a big red on white L on forward and aft.

Im liking this idea the ability to work as a gun for hire, what about as a pirate we provide the ship we take 60% of any bounties or loot u make and sell ( % could vary on each contract) in return u get a ship to fly a set time to make youre profit and some sort of ranking system to.

Interplanetary shuttle.

Oh that's cold man, imagine loading this thing up and being given one of those... ouch 😯

I always liked Frontiers reason, you've inherited the ship and some credits and off you go.

It'd be like inheriting a rickety old family yacht these days and enough for a months mooring fees.

It did assume you either had, or did not require, a licence but after a couple of crash landings you got the hang of it quick enough 😳

Brianetta, when I think of a job as a turret gunner I'm reminded of "extended periods of intense boredom, interrupted by occasional moments of sheer terror." You'd have no control of the ship whatsoever, so you do time acceleration until something interesting occurs. You could also negotiate for bounties... I kind of like it!

Geraldine, I like the idea of having to earn a pilot's (and gunnery) license. Perhaps a tutorial could be included that you would have to pass before the authorities would allow you to fly the ship you inherited from your uncle Jameson.

I think the ship should be an Eagle Mk1. 😉

Like X, the difficulty level could simply be the starting conditions. Normal could be like Frontier, with all licenses granted and hardware provided. Easy could give you a more capable ship with plenty of cash (and a boredom warning). Hard could give you the infamous Interplanetary Shuttle, no licenses yet, and very little cash.

Of course, the hard start described above would need the game to support an interplanetary method of earning money. In Frontier, the only way to do that was to purchase rubbish or radioactives and dump them in space, risking the wrath of the police and the financial overhead of a fine.

There would need to be intra-system courier missions. Just like the regular ones, but to other stations in the current system, with truncated timescales to match. There would also need to be subtle differences in the price of goods at various starports within a system. Taking Sol as an example, the research base at Pluto shouldn't be exporting luxuries; it should be importing food, robots or luxuries, exporting rubbish, and very little else. The margins here should be low; interstellar trade should always be where the money is (somewhere that X fell down, in my opinion) but certainly, the mundane run of mail and supplies from Earth to the Moon and back, or from Jupiter to Pluto, should be an option for the terminally skint.

of course for intra planetary trading u would need world types and perhaps each world having slight differences in exports imports etc. Bigger planets supply more bulk goods perhaps and smaller outposts might have some specialisation

Sounds like you just volunteered. Cheers!

ideas generation and bug testing only 😀

The issues tracker is the place for bug testing. Seriously - it gets checked scores of times each day, whereas I come here perhaps one a day and read the posts that don't look boring. Feature requests should also go onto the tracker.

Seriously, though, ollobrain: Lua is not a particularly difficult language to learn, and even if you really can't get to grips with it, but could otherwise design a mission, I'd definitely recommend that you do that designing, even if it's just drawing a flowchart of bulletin board choices, actions and game events. This would help the developers to identify Lua features that don't yet exist, that your missions might need. Also, a well thought out and complete flowchart could be coded up by somebody else.

Many of the ideas you come up with could already be put into the game using Lua code. This means, unfortunately, that the developers aren't going to get around to doing them; we're pretty much hoping that other people will contribute Lua missions while the devs get on with shaping up the game itself, making it playable and relatively free of bugs.

So, I want to encourage you to join in. It's not scary, and we are here to help. It's something we'd really appreciate.

It would also be nice if you would start the game so flat broke you'd have to work with a simple planetbound transport vessel with no space going capabilities. On planets with more than 1 city, you could make a living transporting stuff from city to city without the possibility to enter space. Or if the cities were bigger, move stuff from one side of the city to a factory on the other side of the city. 😀

That way you'd have to work a couple of hours to save up for a spaceship! Would be a nice starter for the game instead of already owning a spaceship with credits. And when you have your spaceship, you could use the bulletinboard to offer your services like Marcel said. I think this would make the gameworld appear even bigger when you spend more time planetbound.

If only I were a modelling wizard, I would start pumping out simple building models like crazy. Factories, houses, officebuildings, commercial centers, etc. Anything to help make cities more detailed. Gosh, I love this game.

Trouble with taking it that far, is that you'd need to write code into Pioneer telling it what planet-bound means, and how that works. Being a space game, the idea of transport that can't get into space just doesn't exist in the game as it stands.

Another approach would be starting in an orbital station, with no hyperdrive, no autopilot and no atmospheric shielding... then making it play out that autopilots and hyperdrives are only available from the planet's surface. So, first thing the player has to do make their life less hands-on is learn to dock at an orbital, selectively choose missions and trade to scrape together the pennies for atmospheric shielding, then learn to land on a surface, then continue trying to earn money to buy that hyperdrive and finally break into the world of interstellar trade.

I'd go for that, and it's the sort of thing that shouldn't be too difficult to arrange. The hardcore start, for people who find life too easy by default.

Addendum: To make it even harder still, and really take the piss, give the player a ship that isn't compatible with atmospheric shielding. That way, they have to actually save up for a new ship before they can even consider purchasing an autopilot or leaving the system. I'm pretty sure I could think of things to make it even more daunting.

Nah, that's too easy. You'd have to walk, and try to save up enough money to buy a bicycle. 😆

Seriously, there was a cool(hand) ground vehicle model in development, but travel between cities on the ground? That would be a long drive, and probably have to be done in real time. I do this in Flight Simulator, but there are roads and rivers to follow. How about a pure aircraft? I know there's no atmospheric lift in Pioneer, but a craft that doesn't have enough thrust to leave a planet's gravity might be a way to fake it. Perhaps a hover jet can be simulated by using the atmospheric density to modify the force of the thrusters. As the atmosphere gets thinner the thrusters would become less powerful.

That would work fine in a system like Sol with lots of places to go. Transporting supplies to Pluto seems like a way to make a living. Actually, it reminds me of Elite in an in-system way, because you could never land anywhere back then. You should be able to land on Pluto and other bodies that lack an atmosphere, however. We might call it the Elite option!

There would only need to be one system set up and tested this way. Sol's an ideal candidate, but any other custom system could be prepped.