a) should be based on the ship their flying as well as their lvl. A 12th lvl vet in a free bus shouldn't give tons of XP

b) There should be significant consequences to giving another player XP. I would suggest that the majority of XP be gained from Missions and that their would be large enough consequences for losing the missions that players wouldn't just agree to "exchange" XP and let each other win (at the moment people will let their friends kill them in a stock bus standing still in exchange for the same thing). I would NOT suggest that losing the missions results in a loss in XP since this would mean that all net gain of XP would have to come from enormous amounts of boting, which the AI is not interesting enough to support.

The XP you get from killing other players has increased -significantly-. killing someone around my level or lower has given me +500 xp, which is far more xp than the bots give.

--should the ships of the respective players be compared relatively? if player A's bus kills player B's vult, player A would get a larger bonus and so on...
*nevermind. that's too complicated and exploitable*