FTLfield

[FALCmods4all]

There are a lot of great mechanics from FTL that would be fun if we could find a way to get them into starfield.

Already good threads on things like fuel, fleets, etc, so I want to focus here on ideas for autopilot, manual repairs, crew, weapons, and defenses.

Autopilot
The hardest thing to implement, but one with the most interesting applications would be real autopilot in docking and combat. The ability to move around a ship while the ship moves. Additionally, it would be great to be able to find or design autopilot defensive maneuvering patterns. This could then be coupled with things like manual turret substations. Manually controlling a rear turret while crew or autopilot move the ship. If the autopilot system is damaged, manual docking may be required.

Manual Repairs
In survival mode (assuming we’re getting one), it would be great if only exterior systems can be auto repaired by drone and the player must direct priorities. Other systems, hull breaches, fire, etc must be repaired manually by crew or the player. It may be possible to lack materials for repairs and be forced to take chances with surrender or S.O.S. If out of repair drones it would be great to be forced to spacewalk a repair, or at least risk a crew member to do it if too hard to mod spacewalks.

Crew
It would be great if crew could go mad, turn out to be spies, get knocked out or killed under fire, consider cannibalism  if stranded in deep space with broken comms for extended time, etc. Bring a little Sunless Sea/Skies in. It might be nice to allow the player to operate different systems and include minigames for optimal operation. On a larger ship, maybe keeping the shields up is the most important task, or if running from a hoard if pirates, maybe one needs to carefully overload the engines. More situational ship tasks might greatly increase immersion, particularly of designed with VR in mind. Computer cores could also play a more important role in target acquisition and autopilot with hacking and cooling as operation improvement tasks.Basically, the larger the ship, the more vital crew and systems should become over piloting alone.

Weapons/Defenses
I’d love to see adaptations of all FTL weapons/defenses and rare unique ships that need to be found and scuttled to reverse engineer them. Also, interested to see better stealth, distance, mines, etc mechanics for games of cat and mouse in space. Perhaps some more nebula locations with low visibility where limited scanning techniques may be the only way to see or be seen at range. Maybe nukes and anti nuke devices. Maybe very long distance rail guns and long distance jammers. So much potential for interesting trade offs.