it would be AMAZING if we could defect to other nations if we have admire with that other nation but at the cost of the old nation becoming hate. even better would be if we could defect to the minor factions like corvus or tungsta.

+1 under the stipulation of there being a cap, the role play elements could be cool but just nation hopping for the hell of it seems like it wouldn't make much sense. That's why there are several character slots.

It would have to be a permanent defection (no going back), otherwise people would just use the mechanic to play 'collect the specialized space widget.'

I'm ambivalent on the idea. In concept it sounds cool, especially as far as RP is concerned, but it would be a benefit in almost every way as far as what you gain ("oh, you bought 1000 skyproms and then defected to Itani? Here, enjoy your infinite Valks"). It should come with additional downsides, such as never being able to rise above dislike (or even hate) with the nation you defected from. Maybe this would be dependent upon what you defect to. Defect to a minor faction, you can't rise above respect with any of the major nations. Defect to a major faction and the nation you defect from will never trust you again. Maybe even make the third nation (for example, you go from Serco to UIT, but Itani takes notice) trust you less, so you can only go to +200.

Another idea is to decrease the rate at which you gain reputation with all factions significantly. People don't trust traitors.

All that aside, I think being able to make your name the color of whatever minor faction you align with would be kind of cool. There'd need to be an expansion of benefits for that faction to make it worthwhile for anything other than chat purposes, though.

`Another idea is to decrease the rate at which you gain reputation with all factions significantly. People don't trust traitors.`

This is probably one of the best concepts to apply to this. I will also agree that you should have limitations with specific factions. I.E if you defect to TPG, you could still get good reputation with UIT but perhaps far lower caps with Itani/Serco. Perhaps even cap it at neutral. There would be a lot of hard caps in place, so it would definitely take a lot of decision making and would likely not be what everyone wants there...

A Corvus defection should essentially be the piracy avenue we have discussed on many other occasions. This would take a significant amount of work that exceeds the scope of this request. You would essentially end up a minimum of dislike and max of KOS with the other factions.

`It would have to be a permanent defection (no going back), otherwise people would just use the mechanic to play 'collect the specialized space widget.'`
This precisely. If it wasn't permanent, you'd have people spending the absurd money or time it takes to go buy, as Ionic said, 1000 sky proms then going back to buying valks.

While it opens up certain avenues for role-play and game progression as mentioned above, it feels redundant and doesn't address levels of exploitation (like shown in Paul's post). There's a historical reason why the devs do nation changes under their current rules. We have six character slots to explore various play styles.

Defection is an amazing idea for role-play in the game. I don't think "national widget collection" would be a serious problem and would in fact make the role-play much deeper. Nevertheless, this is easily circumvented with a simple note on the "defection screen" that your "national widgets" will be confiscated. I like the suggestion as originally stated. Possible circumvention of cross-nation widget ownership seems to be an obvious initial concern that is probably easy to settle at implementation or leave in place for role-play depth.