IDEAS.txt

Here be ideas about what might or might not be added into the game
at some point.

*** MONEY:

Add some kind of money into the game, and each ship would have an
account, controlled by the COMMS officer.  At starbases, you could
buy and sell various items of cargo, and upgrade your ship.  Ship
upgrades could be accomplished by initially depriving the ship of
various modules on the DAMAGE CONTROL screen, which could be bought.
It might also be possible to start the ship off with only a single
laser cannon (instead of current dual laser cannons) and no torpedo
system (Damage control, again), which could be upgraded at starbases
for money.  Maybe even add a second weapons turret (requiring another
player to man it) on the bottom of the ship for a price.

Allow COMMS to interact with starbases and NPC ships with more options,
buying/selling/trading cargo, ship systems, torpedoes, fuel.  Allow
comms to try to extort NPC ships to release their cargo, pay tribute,
or... something like that.  Allow transfer of funds between player ships.
*maybe* funds transfer between NPC ships and player ships. (what about 
derelicts -- perhaps bearer bonds might be found aboard, or... something?)

*** ASTEROID MINING

goes with money, above, some way to extract some loot and/or fuel
from asteroids.

*** SHARDS

allow players to travel from a universe hosted on one server to
a universe hosted on another via some kind of gate, a la the old
BBS "doors" or something.  May be too hard to do securely, sanely.
But it would be a way to make the universe "bigger" and would
be scalable (at some cost that might be prohibitive).

*** CHECKPOINT RESTART

Some way to checkpoint the universe state and restart it.  This is
hard for two reasons:  player state, and lua state.