What SE V or SE IV 1.5 needs....LIFEPODS! (and ideas for capturing bonuses)

[MKSheppard]

If you look at Comp_119.bmp in your components
picture directory, you see something that
looks like a lifepod...

Lifepods were in MOO2 under a different name
, as escape vehicles allowing your ship
captains to survive the destruction of their
vehicles, and keep their experience in your
fleet.

I think that for a life-pod equipped vessel, you should get a new option: Abandon Ship, in which your surviving crewmembers
run to the lifepods and bLast away from the
smoking flaming hulk their ship has become,
becoming a group of fighter-scale craft.

If you want to keep your crew (and their
experience), you have to win the battle
or recover the lifepods before you flee.

Conversely, this could add strategy to the
game, as you could capture enemy lifepods,
and ruthlessly interrogate their crews,
learning a few new systems on the
starmap from the crew, and maybe a tech or
two if you manage to capture an engineer
(see below).

If you added a "Crew Complement" statistic
to the ship/component screen, it would be
quite useful, because you'd have a BASE
complement for each hull size, and that
would be added onto with each component
you put on, for example, a MASSIVE gun mount
would need 50 gunners to fire it, etc,
Ion Engine Is would need 50 engineers
to run, while Ion Engine IIIs would only need 15 (reduced maintenance needs and
more automation)....

This conversely, could bring about NEUTRON
GUNS...an insidious weapon that if a ship
has NO shields, kills 'x' number of crew
per turn, with NO DAMAGE to the ship, allowing you to capture an intact hulk

Comments?