i was thinking about the way the canceled b5 game would have been. where you could move beyond fighter flying and move up to criusers and larger vessels and take a captains or admiral's responsibilities.
most of whats nessiscary is already implemented, but a few more details could give freespace a more tactical feel. flying a capship in itself is boring, but to actually command the battle would be awesome.
first off you can fly a capship but the interfaces needed to actually command it are either missing or not very streamlined. gunnery, sensors, fighter launching, ect. also the ability to track multiple targets would be of great use.
first of targeting. add controls for targeting wings or for creating lists of ships. also you could designate targets for different fighter/turret groups. like target a hostile bomber wing and designating it as a target for alpha. or targeting a criuser so you can assign your forward battry the job of taking it out. essentially assigning tasks to their apropriate fleet resources. also would define groups for a particular task and underling command structures. for example asigning a cruiser and a fighter wing to function as an attack group and assigning a group of targets, for example a pair of enemy criusers, that they are tasked with destroying.
to command the ships in the battle scenario more effietiently you would use a more advanced com menu. things relative to fighter comnbat (rearm for example) would be replaced by operations command, like control over dockings and launching escape pods. you would also have direct access to defined groups. continuing from the previous example you would open your com menu and your battle group would apear in the list, from that list you could assign the fighters to intercept turrets so your criuser could attack while taking less damage.
for gunnery control you can replace the fighter gunnery control hud panel with one that can list turrets. it would have 2 panels and would use the same controls as weapon selection. the fist panel (replacing the primary select) gives you the option to list turrets by type (large beams, aaa beams, flak, missile, laser) or location (fore, aft, port, starbord, dorsal, ventral), controls for this panel would be / to select group, and shift+/ to toggle type/location modes. the group panel lists the turrets in the selected group. you would use the primary select controls to cycle through this group. selecting a turret doesnt give you control over it, but rather allows you to tell it what to do. you would use your primary and secondary triger to cycle through the various behaviors the turrets would follow and what groiups they are designated to attack.
its complicated and probibly doesnt make any sence but the idea is simple. command a big ship, command a battlegroup, essentially turning freespace from an action game ito a rts. not in the gather resoursces and build stuff sence but in the tactcal command of an assigned fleet. i think it would be cool.
