Just got this idea and thought i'd mention it, maybe be able to play the "radio" in the ship and have others hear it? like, load up an local ogg. file, and have it playing on your system, and have it playing globally, but only when someone else is in range of the ship, add some nice doppler effect as well, could be cool. (unless you're on dial-up.....)

yay, another way to waste phenominal amounts of bandwidth there!

Would be cool, but not practical, perhaps shoutcast and a message bind would be more effective =p

asphy

I think a better suggestion would be a Voice command system as used in games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein. U push v foor example, which brings up a list of taunts/requests/acknowledgments etc etc which correspond to numbers. u push V then the corresponding number to activate a voice file which is played thru either guild or local sector. there cud be a menu for guild chat and a menu for sector. It would probably need to be type limited so say, 2 seconds per command, which shud give enough time for the voice command to complete. This would be a good post relelase concept, as it also requires voices to be recorded, which may not be feasible currently...
Just a thought
Kestrel

Hey good idea. Realtime voice comms between in-range ships. I like it. As you say, might hog the bandwidth but make it an option for those that have it.

As someone's already said, playing music from your computer would be a huge bandwidth hog. A system such as that in Battlefield Vietnam may work, where there is a set of songs loaded into the game that you can play while in a vehicle, and people can hear if they are near. But i honestly dont think it would add much to gameplay (unless a pirate starts playing the song from Jaws right as they are about to attack a target...)

And for voice comms, if you really want them you can always get someone to run a ventrilo or teamspeak server