[CheshireKatt]

I'm baaaaaack....

More Ideas, of a less-critical (but cool to me) nature:

The majority of these are combat-related, and have little to no impact on actual gameplay, they're just "nice".

The ability to specify more "styles" of beam effect, either as a native weapon effect, or one granted from a Weapon Mount (ex. the Wave Motion Gun might fire a cone-shaped beam. It still hits one target, but fans out towards the end, or the "Rapid Fire" weapon mount fires the beam three quick times at the target) Additionally, the ability to have "animated" beams -- ones that just cycle through a series of frames specified to it.

Multiple Component Enhancements per component, restrictable from CompEnhancement.txt as to which enhancements stack or prohibit each other.

Component Enhancements as researchable tech, not just as "everyone can do this" as it is now.

The ability to have Component Enhancements that make Seekers faster or slower.

Ammunition on seekers that's not just in terms of reload time.

Area-of-effect weapons.

Line / Cone piercing weapons. (Hits all targets on a line / in a cone -- now THAT'S a Wave Motion Gun).

Stasis guns -- the ship can't move / act, but can't be shot, either.

Tholian Webs, or other weapons that can lay obstacles in tactical combat in a useful manner (laying mines in tactical is kind of silly, but other things might be nice -- placing obstructions, a gun that foams up a nice big 1x5 hex area or something with magnetic debris, organic matter, or just a plain-old force-shield. Destroyable, of course, settable to block or not block fighters / seekers / beams as the tech-modder sees fit)

Debris / asteroids / nebulae / harmful other stuff placed in battlefields as appropriate to the location of combat (or such things a sector away, maybe placing their stuff around the edges) -- could make for some interesting cat-and-mouse, flying ships between asteroids that you can't shoot over (but can blow up, given enough effort), or hiding your ship in a nebula to make it invisible.

Combat cloaking.

Combat teleporters.

Non-combat ideas:
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Debris fields. Sort of a fixed-quantity asteroid field that disappears once mined out. Maybe generated at the sites of space battles where a certain tonnage of ship(s) were destroyed? Also preplacable in sector definitions.

Derelicts

More sector "move ship" functions - slide left, slide right, slide top, slide bottom (not just "slide to this sector"), rotation functions (rotate ship around this point -- could make REALLY cool blackholes that way -- a rotator and a slide to center trigger, to let you do real slingshot moves around the blackhole).

That's it for the current batch of my ideas. Stay tuned for the third (fourth?) batch at a message board near you. :P

--Chesh