Actually, one thing I realized that sort of kills freespace 2 missions is the 'single outcome' scenario. I.e. you play it once and it's the same result either way, to win you do everything correctly or you lose, simple as that...
Multiple outcomes are possible, yes, but with each mission like that you complicate matters further, exponentially. Meaning after this you now have to have two (or more) missions done that simulate every eventuality. If any of the following missions have multiple outcomes, the complexity grows as every outcome now branched into several further outcomes each. Even a 5 mission campaign could easily need like 15-20 missions designed that way.
I wonder if there would be a way to incorporate "dice rolls" into certain missions to give them added replay value...
That's not how the game works. Every "dice roll" eventuality would have to be remembered and carried over to the next mission. Now let's say we have several dice rolls per mission, resulting in several eventualities, that have to carry over through the campaign. Then next mission does the same, and the next, etc. The way this game works, it would become a huge mess impossible to control before you reached mission 2. In the world of "sims" there are two main types of campaigns: scripted and dynamic. Scripted basically have a predetermined path the player needs to follow, with maybe two simulated outcomes on rare occasions. The downside is you're on rails, the up side is the story can actually get a lot more interesting as it's possible to write events that would never happen in a dynamic campaign.
Dynamic campaigns usually translate into 3 or 4 basic mission types that repeat until game over. The overall result is calculated based on player performance. The up side is, every time you play it will be slightly different. The down side is, every time you play it will be almost the same - as you are, for all intents and purposes, just repeating 3 basic mission types; one has you escorting bombers, other has you intercepting bombers, and another has you just pure dogfighting. Over and over. I never played a dynamic campaign that didn't bore me out of my skull - I much prefer a predetermined but well written story.
i.e. the carrier shows up, you are dispatched to intercept it, you get orders to fire across the bow, radiology alarm goes off, but when doing a flyby you notice people moving in the windows(different from the actual show) and order a rescue operation, if you miss the cue to order a rescue op and shoot down the ship you only find out after the mission is over...
To do this feature, which may seem trivial, you actually need to do a huge amount of work. First off, you need to actually model the interior of said ship. And probably other ships because it's weird only one has interior. Then, you need to texture the interiors, bake light solutions, etc. When that is done you have an empty ship, so you need characters. Moving around. Building characters for games is one of the most difficult part of game design. Rigging and animating them, even more so. And you can't have one character copied all around because it'll look totally wrong. So you have to build, texture, rig and animate at least a dozen characters just so the player can take a short look through the window. There is a very good reason why you never see things like that in games of this type.
There's also a reason why the most complex of games take huge studios with large budgets, and whole teams of artists paid to sit there all day and model, texture and animate everything needed. With a small volunteer based team, this is isn't a realistic goal.
It's a huge request but maybe a few single player/multiplayer missions could be crafted this way just for the heck of it...
It's huge enough that I can tell you realistically that this isn't going to happen. What may be possible in future campaigns is a mission or two that do have multiple endings. But considering how much extra workload this entails to make it right, I wouldn't expect it soon, or a lot of it. What we might do is, for example, in a campaign in mission 5 you have to defend a convoy of ships. One of those ships is very difficult to protect and normally dies first. If you do manage to protect it, bonus objective met. Then 3 missions later you have a better outcome because that ship survived and came to your aid when needed. Those sort of things are possible, but we'll see just how much of them we implement over time.