Space Tourism might make an interesting mission category. You could have:

1) taxi missions - get someone somewhere as quickly as possible.
2) sight seeing mission - take a group of people somewhere and return then safely and comfortably
3) thrill rides - take a group on as wild a ride as possible

Good idea.

defenatey

i especialy like the idea of the thrill rides.
although it does beg the question of exactly how, the game will determing what is a 'wild ride'

(velocity/(distance to nearest object)) * time = score

higher score within time limit = more moneys.

taking damage of any amount will cut your total pay significantly.

WWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

but is that average velocity, or maximum attained?
and shouldn't tarveling throug hostil space (ie getting shot at), add something to the danger factor?
and what if the mission is taken with a moth vs a bus? should the invulnerable moth get the same score as a bus (assumin all other variables are held constant for comparasin perpuses)?
what about ion storms, how if at all should they affect the "wildness" of a ride?

personaly i think those and probably several other factors should be concidered, rather than just how fast and how close you come to objects. with something like a thrill ride, the more the payoff feals like it's being made by a not perticularly rational person (ie a non-linear payoff system) the better the mission will be.

That sounds cool

Average velocity of course, measured over the whole distance. Maximum would not make much sense, now would it?

Neither, it's instantaneous.

Or, to cut back on processor overhead generated by spooling through calculus formulas constantly, you could make it average per second (m of a one-second secant)

well now, velocity isn't that much fun is it? its acceleration where the thrill lies.

So it would make more sense to take a derivative there or two and then work it out.

for the 'wild ride' getting like, up to 50% health would be good, since you are trying to give em' the thrills =D

for wild ride, they could temporarily disable the anti-inertia zobotron. then they could steal code from flight simulators and have 'blackout' and 'redout'.

a dumb linear scale for grading a mission would lead to some boring ass power-leveling, people doing donuts or something.

lol, shape...

yea, working in some acceleration would be good..

and shouldn't tarveling throug hostil space (ie getting shot at), add something to the danger factor?

I don't mean to mock, but this strikes me as extremely funny. "HEY HEY KIDS! We're going to be flying deep into ENEMY TERRITORY and a WARZONE today!"

It'd be pretty fun, just not very feasable since taking civilians into enemy territory would be too dangerous.

how about hive controled teretory?
that's more acurately what i had ment. but regardless i still thinkg being shot at (by pirats, bots, enemy fighters, etc.) but not signifigantly damaged could constitute a "wilder" ride than one that just involves lots of fly-bys.

anyway, here is a take 2 on Cunjo's original equation

The sum of [(a(2(Vn)-(Vn-1))/bD)-c(1-H)+dR+eTi] from [launch] till [docking] by [1 second]

where a, b, c, d, and e are constants used to weight the various parts of the equation
Vn is the curent velocity, and Vn-1 is the velocity from the previous second. when n = 0 Vn = 0.
D is the distance to the closest object
H is one if the ship has taken damage this second and 0 if it has not
R is a randomly determined value that is recalculated each second
Ti is 1 if you are in an ion storm, and 0 if not.

**sorry about the notation, i made most of it up as i went along

anyway, i don't see that equation being practicle to implement. now i don't know what the mission editer is/will be capable of, but this would take a more hands on level of coding than i'd expect it can handle.

I'm with A-Dawg on this one