for christ sake rin, lol

What you are suggesting is essentially player to player ship trade.

If you start another thread for player to player ship trading, I'll +1 it.

Without ship trading, what you are suggesting is not possible. So that would require a much bigger change than what I am suggesting.

And it's not magic that some shadey fucks in Corvus acquired the ships...it's just typical Corvus corruption :]

First off, nice to see you draugath!

Secondly, uhhh, fuck yea! That's a great idea. It creates another player to player economy with some awesome and interesting mechanics involved.

Plus...ship trading is soooo badly needed. But alas; this thread isn't about ship trading.

But like I said to Rin...that big of a change will not happen in the near future, in my opinion.

The mission tree I am suggesting would be something that could be done relatively soon, and with very little dev-time. The amount of time to implement both you and Rin's ideas would not be "trivial". My suggestion would only require them to make SCPs, X1s, and UDVs available to the PCC. And then the little time it would take for them to actually test it (which would obviously also be done by the PCC) and put it into production.

On the topic of likelihood of implementation, keep in mind that your suggestion relies on the devs adding things to the mission editor.

*genuine question*

How much trouble is it to add things to the mission editor that already exist?

Seems like that would be a trivial thing.

I think adding ship trading would be a trivial thing as well, but I'd imagine it's something that they intentionally do not want to do. I mean, after all the demand for it, it still hasn't been implemented (except that one Christmas).

Rule number 1 in vo suggestions:

What seems trivial is always not.

Let me put it this way. Think of all the changes the devs have made in the last six years -- mobile, f2p, livery, conq stations, capships, faction mutual exclusion, ship persistence, cloud support, the beginnings of supply-side economy, etc.... Now try to think of any changes they have made to the mission editor during that span. I think they did make one or two very small tweaks, and that's it. Despite nagging since 2009, we still cannot even spawn NPC Valks. So maybe I'm being a bit jaded, but I assign very low probability to any suggestion involving changes to the mission editor.

As for ship trade, technically the only missing piece is that ships dropped as items lose their engines, rendering them unusable if you pick them back up. We already have the ability to load ships as cargo, and the functionality to jettison them exists and is simply disabled. The missing engine bug just has to be fixed, and then we could have ship trading.

Though, that would be easy-mode ship trading. They'd still have to add in additional restrictions like the need to jailbreak them or being penalized for flying them in nation space. So having a desirable ship-trading implementation is a bit more work than just fixing the bug.

@bojansplash

+1000

+1 Pizza

RP-wise, I think the best chain of missions would be a set of confidence building missions (e.g. assassinations), followed by a disclosure of a voy shipping valks from a UIT location (where they had been receiving some kind of experimental upgrade) to Itani space. This voy then needs to be killed and the capital ship (hopefully >dent to force team participation) would drop something that allows the player to buy/manufacture Valks in corvus. I do think it should be limited per mission, so you would need to kill another Voy if you run out of valks. If the mission is timed (e.g. once or twice per week), the nation players can get escort missions to help stop the theft. The mission should kill your Itan and UIT standing, and flying the valk into Itani monitored space should again cause a fraction hit.

(of course, similar missions for the other nations)

If and when ship drops and trade is possible, this can be made more realistic, but until then this sounds like a fun thing to do.