For player death: It was always my intention to do the whole "fast moving auto-ejected escape pod" thing, with a "if pod is destroyed, ressurect with penalties to a clone".. but the gameplay repurcussions were too complex for the original game, so we just did "respawning" for simplicity. Michael and I have actually been discussing player death recently (including the whole remote-control arguement), but it isn't something I'm ready to tackle yet.. there's enough other stuff on our plate, and respawning, although lame, does work for the moment. It has been on the brain lately though.

For teleporting in general. Uhh. I can't say I'm really a big fan. But there is merit to having other means of traveling around the universe. Such as boarding a transport, or having your ship "shipped" via some larger vessel, and so on. Having a high-speed transport with a couple of stopping points might be kind of cool (the space bus! heh), but I'm not really in favor of "instantaneous" travel.