how about a weapon that shoots out a beacon that will let you know where it is for 15-30 minutes? you hit a roid, it tells you where it is for a while, but the cool use is to shoot a player / ship, and track that player through systems and sectors until the beacon dies. or how about tagging a bot to go queen-hunting?

this would be great for teamwork in CtC or similar tasks (tag the person carrying the cargo), or for miners trying to steal eachothers mining fields. of course, you'd have to actually tag the mining ship and hope it goes to mine before the beacon runs out.

this weapon would give no warning to the player that one got hit, it would do no damage and it would be almost invisible (think rails). the weapon could come in two versions, a missile version (using magetic grappeling for proximity attachments) or a gun version (magnetic rail beacon pellets).

during normal gameplay you'd get updates every minute or so in your mission terminal of where a beacon is, and you'd get a message every time it jumped. maybe you'd have /beacons list or something. you can also choose to kill a beacon if you're done with it. :-)

the weapon might be sold from a special faction (Corvus?) or from your nation, admired standings would be required.

oh, and for the record, the same weapon-idea could extend to a mass-weapon that when it hits a ship. I'd like to see this weapon work as in "altering" the ship it hits, so that it gains 20-25% mass or so (of ship base weight, weapons and cargo not included).

just to make tramshed happy. :-)

gah, at first i read that as bacon-weapon and and instantly thought that it would be the most awesome weapon ever.

Hey, all you'd need to do is add a lettuce-weapon, a mayo-weapon, and a toast-weapon (or bagel-weapon). :D

No {Ketchup|Catsup}-weapon?
-:sigma.SB

Beacons have been suggested often:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7692

Having said this, I don't recall anything previously about using them for tracking.

Screw that, I want my Baconizer.