Allow some missions to be taken from dockable capships in blockade.

-Combat missions that reward for kills of opposing faction
-Hire a Squadron mission

That's an interesting idea.

We currently have no mechanics to allow missions to be offered by capital ships. I don't really know how complex it would be to add.

It would be a little weird to specify in the PCC editor, in terms of where the mission was supposed to show up. We'd have to add some specialty category for "capships" or something, and then ones flagged to the military, from a particular faction, and then you pick a particular sector, or something along those lines.

We would also have to explicitly.. limit certain standard PCC mission options, like returning to the "station issuing the mission", since the capship might not be there anymore. There are probably a lot of assumptions in the mission system that they would be issued by stations, it might be a bit complex to figure out what they all are.

Dunno. Interesting, but somewhat involved.

Probably not the best bang-for-the-buck in terms of player-value to dev-time.

I thought capships were essentially flying stations

It would be pretty time consuming for me to explain the difference between the "essentially flying stations" analogy, which is true to the point of being a reasonable analogy.. and actual stations that can distribute missions, which use code-paths that are designed around many other assumptions (fixed in place, globally persistent, stored as sector-specific data, etc).

A race car might be "essentially" similar to a normal car, and heavily descended, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

Also, the degree to which the "flying station" analogy is true also changes over time. That description dates back to when capships were first implemented, but we've had to do a significant amount of back-end work to make them persist properly in all kinds of corner cases, while leaving the associated sectors offline.

I didn't say "No" to your suggestion, just that it might be a bit complicated, and there are probably other things that would yield greater benefits in the near term.

As a temporary solution, maybe the adjacent stations could offer one(the mission)?

they'd still have to program in a "find nearest station of __Faction's__ blockade" among whatever else. Maybe not as much work as adding a mission interface to capital ships, but still a ton I bet.

While understanding it would take a lot of work, it also does have the potential to add a whole new avenue of content from ANY capship, including player owned.

You'd have to do the reverse, find if there's a blockade and trigger the mission. It doesn't even need to be smart, just pay some set amount for killing opposing nations ships regardless of a blockades presence, kills need to be in grey. Kinda like the bot hunting missions.

While understanding it would take a lot of work, it also does have the potential to add a whole new avenue of content from ANY capship, including player owned.

Actually, I was discussing a fairly narrow implementation. Doing something completely generic, like you describe, would be more complex still.

Plus, it begs the question of why you need to dock to take a mission at all? If one is doing major, sweeping rewrites of the mission system.

Plus, it begs the question of why you need to dock to take a mission at all? If one is doing major, sweeping rewrites of the mission system.

Well that’s an entirely different discussion. I think, even if there were an overhaul that dispelled the need to dock to take missions, there is still something nice about actually having to still take some missions in stations or ships.