So looking at the wiki I notice the animation code is a bit... lacking. But I have some ideas to make ship animations more complex.
#1.Transition (and scaling?) This is a given. These should both be relative movement only. this should be written as +relative_trans and +relative_scale
#2.Multiple movements in one object animation. Now this would be cool to pull off. Here's and example on how it can work. let's say we have a fighter that has a gun that transforms when switching between the first and second weapon bank, however this gun has multiple parts that move or rotate more than one time in the animation. Each movement segment of animation could be called $frame: and the first 'frame' will start on 0.
Also to make things less buggy/complicated there will also be 2 flags to help it out: +flipper Those who use the Blender Game Engine may know this command. Those who don't, this flag will look and the animation data and play the animation forward if the program statement is true and if the statement is false, it will play the animation backwards from the frame it stopped on. This flag is more to save room on the table sheet.
Another flag that will help is +synctoobj:(add, object, names, here) (or Sync to Objects) The game will look through the associated objects of a ship the user has put in the table that has multiple animations when the animation plays, objects listed that finished their animation frame will wait for all objects that are listed to finish the same frame number before moving to the next frame.
Also i would recommend for the script table that there would be a way to limit user input while the animation is playing. (Like you cant fire the weapon when the gun is transforming.)
So that's all the ideas I have right now. If you want me to elaborate on something on here, go ahead and ask. You can change the flag names if you wish. They just popped into my head while planning this thread out.