Originally posted by Rampage
Another change:
Must be capable of letting a ship enter into a docking bay of a ship and later come out with the same name, stats, etc.
A useful trick invented by ZylonBane: Name one ship Delta 1, and another Delta¤1. In FS2, both names will look like Delta 1.
How does it work? ¤ is a high ASCII character, and the FS2 font doesn't support most of the high ASCII characters, but instead shows a blank in their place. There are quite a number of such unsupported characters (17 that I have bothered to find), so one can have plenty of ships with the "same" name. High ASCII characters are accessed by holding down the Alt key while typing in any four digit number between 0000 and 0255. ¤ is Alt+0164, for example, and other options include 0240-0255 inclusive except for 0252 (which makes the arrow used to indicate a selected weapon on the HUD, IIRC).
Have the ship enter the fighterbay, and then have ship¤ emerge afterwards. To keep the original ship's stats, record them in variables prior to departure, and then use set-subsystem-strength to put ship¤'s subsystems to the values in the variables once it enters the mission.