Yes no matter how evil the cause there have always been those who willingly aid evil or is it a point of view? After all the hive is misunderstood and oppressed.

possible benefits:
fly hive only ships
dock with queens for missions/repairs
fly a leviathon into nation war...

Drawbacks.... start out as disliked for all other factions
Cant kill Bots.

Mission example... anti-hive skirmish

I like this concept. Definitely not something the dev's should be worrying about now though. Once we've got several hundred active players consistently and the devs are making decisions from the Bahamas. Still something that would give a unique game play experience.

Yea this sounds almost like playing as Zombies in Left 4 Dead.

/me wants

I want to fly an Arklan Guardian!

So I could go n00bing in a Stygian Fury? Sign me up!

Why would Hive ships waste resources on maintaining life support and a cockpit?

Why would Hive ships waste resources on maintaining life support and a cockpit?

Your ignorance of our own ships' design is showing, Whistler. Who says any of the meat bag-piloted ships have life support or a cockpit? The Devs themselves have said that perhaps pilots fly via a remote link to the craft.

Even if I wish to stay down at your level of discourse, lacking in depth of intellect as it may, there's still an excellent explanation: the Hive's calculations show that the costs of outfitting some small number of their designs with the modifications necessary to support life are far outweighed by the advantages of being able to draw on the unique strengths of a sentient organic mind.

Aye , as a long term idea this sounds good fun .

Look, I like the concept, but, I don't know how we would go about completing this.

1: The Hive have no stations.

2: Pay double attention to 1: :P

The queens and levithians can serve the same purpose

Ya' know, if the Itani are going to get the Akanese as a special terrorist like faction, it'd only be fitting for the Serco to get one too. This could be it.

These hive lovers would be evil in a completely different sense; instead of vowing revenge and all that jazz, they'd view themselves as valiant protectors of a beautiful new species.

Serco are supposed to be machine loving, cybernetic wackos. The Hive Hippies would just be taking things to a new extreme. It practically writes itself. (It makes me wonder if it isn't already planned; much of the story behind The Hive is shrouded in mystery.)

It practically sounds like some RP I was spinning with Lecter a few years ago.

I love this Idea, however most of the harder hive ships are extremely overpowered and would be far too devastating in the hands of players, the Devus gardian for example has 40k armor and is as manuverable as a warthog, most of the high end hive ships would need to be heavily nerfed for players.

or they could be made two player...

Keep in mind that anyone driving one of these ships is going to be KOS and at the top of the list for everyone else. It is likely you will end up being hunted in groups at times. Moving between systems is also going to be a lot riskier as well.

But you have your entire hive to back you up!
Want to rush Dau? No problem. Call up the nearest leviathins and rush it!

GO GO GO!

I like it, but I don't think they'd have cockpits at all... and I don't think you'd be anything but a 'robot' with a 'malfunctioning' program.