Is there a way to make a border skirmish mission that sends an itani player to a certain sector to "patrol" for 10 minutes. Then, if a serco picks up a mission while an itani patrol is in place, it sends the serco on a 10 minute patrol duty in the SAME sector.
If you leave the sector before your duty is up, you fail the mission and lose a lot of faction points. If you finish your duty and return with out a kill, you get minimal pay and a few faction points. If you finish and have kills, you get a higher pay, good faction points, and extra light weap/heavy weap/whatever points PER KILL. If you die while on mission, instead of failing, you only get pay for the amount of time you were there.
This creates "honorable" fights, creates more fighting along the story lines, and can even segue into getting capital ships. "So I see you've done 50 patrols. We're now allowing you to buy destroyer class gunship, the Serco Hephaestus, and also allow you to take military convoy escort missions." Something like that.
I don't know much about the editor, but it seems like the missions only pertain PVE elements, which just won't work for an MMORPG. I once was thinking of this problem with an online EV Nova (who doesn't think of online EV Nova?). The missions affected time and space, and it clearly would end up interfering with another player's missions. The missions MUST interact in order for PvP to thrive.

I think this idea has a lot going for it the only problem that I could see is someone patrolling an empty sector for 10 minutes and then going back for minimal pay thinking "Why didn't I just choose the Kill The Drones one". A possibility could be that the sector could be facing a scout party from a drone hive, but "intelligence reports sightings of enemy vessels too", and could spawn a drone every 2 minutes or somethiing. Then like you say give an opposing faction the same mission with the wording "Destroy the enemy patrol." Now your making a PVP mission but one that the first side will not just do twice and forget about.

I like the idea of multiple outcomes dependent on player behaviour and I think that this would work well in the same sort of mission system as the Traders Guild missions where you get a bit more scope on what to do.

As for the rewards and progression, you could start introducing faction ranking systems, and depending on the rank of the player you kill - on the mission - you could get a bigger reward.

The more I think about it the more I like it.

I don't know too much about PVP in VO, but is it a fairly fair fight if one of the guys in a heavy ship takes an a fighter?? That was another thing that came to mind.

Many pilots can kill multiple "Heavy" Ragnaroks in a simple Itani IBG Centurion. That's the beautiful part of this game: it's all dependent on your own twitch skill.

For example, If I was in a Ragnarok I would consider myself at a MASSIVE disadvantage when facing a vulture or centurion.

You get combat xp for blowing up high level players!

I think milly has a good point about throwing in some random bots or something to spice it up. It's in line with the backstory and can offer variety depending on if you get PVP or bots.

I like the mission idea.

-Joe

*bump*
I have good ideas, I just can't do crap with them. COME ON! Devs? Have any of you checked this out? If it's not too incredibly hard to make happen, it could be really really great!

get in line, fnugget

LeberMac, if you rig your rag with sunnies and jackhammers, you get a one-hit kill on any vulture or cent.... or most other ships, for that matter.

Ah yes, the MGC.

Easily taken out by a cent or vult pilot who knows what s/he is doing*. (Also, swarm-hog works pretty well against the MGC too.)

*Not applicable when said MGC is piloted by Shape.