me and aardwolf were discussing the feasibility o making an rts mod with the freespace engine. he came up with the idea and was curious if scripting would be capable of doing the job. i think it is very possible that it could be done.
very little in the way of graphics is required for this mod. with the media vps that pretty much takes care of eye candy. most of what is required is script and missions, and to work out the details of gameplay. the last part requires feedback and much discussion.
first off the missions would be 2d for the most part, the view would be much like starcraft. a camera would over a distance over the level pointing down. you would have control of position, zoom and maybe rotation of the camera. a gui would be made to allow ships to be selected and given orders.
there would probibly be some resource mining, possibly from asteroid fields by using freighters. theese would be taken to a base such as an arcadia to be processed. gas miners would jump out of system, and bring back a load of gas to fuel caps. stations would build fighters and couls place orders for larger ships from out of system ship yards. this requires players to hold nodes to get to out of system resources.
fighters and bombers, when completed, fly from the base and dock with your capships' figher bays, thus increasing their fighter complement. they may possible be also sent to a rallying point or right into battle. larger ships warp in from out of system.
intrasystem jumps may be possible. the drives need to be charged up between use. a minimum charge required plus a charge cost per km would probibly also be a good idea. the accuracy of the jump would also diminish with distance of deployment. ships jumping together would still come out in formation, but the position of that formation would vary. also there would be a limit for how close you can jump to a given object. it would be cheap to jump bombers in 300 meters from their targets.
capship battles remain the same, but you can control the waypoints caps may follow, or explicitly give them a position to hold. beam weapons and engines would require fuel. fuel is tracked and when gets low needs to be replentished with a gas miner docking with it. the ship is essentially disabled and unable to use large weapons untill refuling occures. they also need materials to be shipped in from the base or from a supply depot, to supplement things like field repairs, weapon manufacture, and figher repairs.
there are many other details but i dont recall them all.