Neutral ships that you can hire for an amount of money that would depend on the ship's level and how long you want them in the fleet. They could also instantly disband if you ever went into debt.
#The option to hire mercenaries
edgy ridge
drifting patrol
simply expanding the 'hail' functionality to allow hiring neutral combat ships as mercs would be great
edgy ridge
simply expanding the 'hail' functionality to allow hiring neutral combat ships a...
true true, then you could have some kind of "negotiation" UI where you would make an offer as to how long they would stay in your fleet and how much you would pay them
placid kiln
I think expending this so you could sell mercenaries your own ships for them to pilot would be really fun. You wouldn't be able to modify the ships anymore, but the crew would also work for let's say what 75% of the ship's value would cover in time. You would also be able to like temporarily send them to be on their own and call them back to your side when you don't need their help to save on time, but would loose a bit of their time doing so and thus would lose some of the time they had left working for you.
When you spend all of the time they had left working for you (paid their "debt" to you) they'd just work as normal mercenaries, but maybe you could always know where they are and call them in from anywhere? I guess if those ships do well for their price range you could start seeing some of them being organically produced after a while (maybe you could sue the people who leaked your design and got rich off of it in that case? Could be fun.) and sometimes have stations be willing to pay for your blueprints, and the factions that would have bought it from you would start producing them.
I said you'd be unable to modify the ships you'd sell to those mercenary crews, but I think paying them to "update the design" would be a nice addition there always are improvements to be made.