Bitmouse

How would it be to implement a "tractor beam" to kidnapp/steal ships, with a big ship, or some small ships who pull it together?

I would like to suggest a module for ships and structures that would be capable of scanning all minerals in hexagon where the module is located. It would be expensive and energy demanding device. It would only show you if mineral is there and not the location. And to make it hard scanning would take 6 hours for example and during the scan all other ships or structures capabilities would be disabled. It could be usefull when you are looking for specific hard to find minerals.

Hey GunDeva. Sorry. I posted my response after a long day and I was tired. I agree with your points here. My point is that that is redundant when a civilization would have the technology to draft creations, like we have now. What would be more likely going out collecting minerals and then creating/destroying creations until you get a final design, or just drafting it in a program until you get something that works on paper and then trying it out in the real world?

I do understand you want this game to be player run but what if Corporations/Players could be in-charge of there own NPC's. Like a Robot/Drone/Clone army that could be destroyed by opposing players for resources that they hold or contain. The NPC's could only act as scripted by players and more complicated commands would need a player to tell the army or just one NPC what to do.

IDEA: A way to visually identify what players are proficient in key skills, and inversely, a way to show the players around you what your specializations are.
 
Concept: Characters could have cosmetic items, or skins for their suit/tools, that are unlocked by reaching skill benchmarks in specific areas.
 
Fleshing it out: Each skill category (Piloting, guns, scanning, mining, refining, engineering, etc) could have a skill icon associated with said skill. At a certain benchmark, you unlock the ability to wear that icon on your character's suit, or on an article of clothing. This would tell the players around me at least one set of skills I'm proficient in for the purposes of forming loose teams, and also inform them at what level of proficiency I am in that skill.
 
The Engineering skill for example might have a Wrench icon associated with it. A soon as a player becomes proficient in Basic Engineering, they get access to the Wrench Icon as an accessory for their space suit, which would place it on your character's back and on the upper left-hand side of your chest. As a player progresses to Engineering Rank 2, that wrench icon changes to have a #2 incorporated in it, or a wrench with a stripe across it or something, showing the players around you that you have Rank 2 proficiency in the engineering skill.
 
A character could only have 1 skill icon equipped at a time, but they could switch between them. This would be useful for ORGS because they could use it to display who a ranking member is within an org. The Cheif Engineer for example might be the only player permitted to equip "Engineering Rank 4" because an org could decide to use that insignia to show who the ranking officer is at any given tame, same for military roles.
 
I see this as being especially useful though with players who are meeting each other for the first time in-game, and are divvying up tasks for a play session. If I volunteered to be our crew's scanner, I'd equip my Scanning rank insignia, the miner would equip mining, engineer would equip engineering etc. That way we know by looking at each other which one of us is supposed to do what, and players that want to join would know what skillsets we might be missing, or might be able to show us that they are better at scanning than I am for example by equipping their higher rank insignia. It might make cooperating on-the-fly more efficient.

What I really want in any game is Mechs. This might be a stretch to do since the it either needs to function flawlessly or it needs to use some sort of pre-made animation (which would be difficult to fit on so many different designs) but if i could have one thing, it would be giant robots. more like a Gundam style as well as any other style people like such as mechwarrior, or the Big O, whatever Giant Robot floats your boat. of course it would all be up to the player. maybe they could have some sort of skeleton that you could build off of and that skeleton would have the pre-made animations and you would just be putting on the armor and weapons. might be a bit too much, but it will always be a small dream of mine.
 
For now I can just play pretend by building a ship in the shape of a Gundam even though the arms/legs don't move. if they added some sort of rotors like on Space Engineers or some sort of moving parts mechanic then that would be more than enough for me.

Perhaps offline mode is the wrong terminology for me to have used, as the offline component isn't relevant. The component which is relevant is the capacity to build/revise creations and export to blueprint. This could be integrated into a system wherein the user still had to login, circumventing many of the concerns you mentioned. In fact it could be hosted on a low resource server to address all the concerns, however,  would that really be necessary?
 
Is piracy more possible with a client hosted creative mode? If no then it would bring more content and people to the game than it would likely take.
 
Is piracy a bad thing for a game? Many industries build piracy into their profit models and account for it as a form of loss. Piracy wouldn't take away from the main thing that Novaquark can offer which is access to the game's main population. This is akin to World of Warcraft and the various pirate servers. What's more is that the pirate servers can't keep up technologically. 
 
It is likely that this form of piracy accounts for a percentage of the main games population that is in the lower end of single digit percentages and many of these people are people who wouldn't or couldn't afford to play the main game.

The current game mode is a creative mode without the need for resources. NQ stated that blueprints from the alpha/beta will be useable at launch. This change would allow users to utilize the game engine without having to stress their servers. More bugs may be discovered in the engine. 
 
Also, it would increase the useable time for building, which is the main feature currently available during pre-alpha. 
 
 

An in game Construct Creator would give designers the capacity to efficiently build, test, and iterate designs. This could be done in a way that utilizes current technology slated for development in the game. 
 
One method would be to use reformat-able zones. Players would spawn into these zones with a tool set similar to what is being implemented in pre-alpha. After the play session the zone is formatted.