(Better Story name pending, ideas welcome)
Idea is that you start in neutral(1),
You start with a small base and a small ship, you're basically a farmer who is making his money through selling ores you have mined/crops you have harvested on your base. The markets you are selling to are on different planets and therefore pay different prices(probably randomized?) of course there would be a market on the base planet as well as you wouldn’t have a ftl drive or any other means to get to different planets.
The markets also sell you better Farming ships and cargo ships with ftl drives.
These ships aren’t really modifiable for you as you are a simple farmer, you can mainly only equip other "weaponry"(your tools used for farming) and exchange simple parts for storage(and vice versa); so basically anything that doesn’t require much knowledge about space engineering.
As a farmer you are also vulnerable to pirates and aggressive smugglers who try to raid your base/ships to get your cargo and maybe take over your ships(if implementable).
You can use multiple ships if you can pay for the crew and the repair of the ships.
You don’t have a main ship nor a main base.
This is where we go further(2);
You yourself can become a pirate and try to take over other ships and farmers equipment. By the time you are a pirate you have learned to change your ships and are now able to modify your ships a lot more, mainly with the parts you are able to scrap of the boarded ships, from markets(as before as a farmer) and from black markets.
But you wont always be able to get full health parts, e.g. when boarding the ship gets damaged, you will then only be able to use the damaged parts until you;
A ) find the same part again and scrap them into one, depending on the base health of the parts scraped together the result will ensue, eg one 70 and one 30% part give one 100% part, two 70 and one 50% part can give you two 95% prats or one 100% part and one 90% part.(and so on)
B )buy them at ridiculous prices from the black markets around the galaxy, where you can get most "normal"(e.g. small cannon, laser blaster etc.) at full health but most "higher" weapons are damaged(still reading a price multiple of what you’d pay for it in bounty hunter mode). the same applies here with multiple damaged parts as in parts you find.
You will have one (pirate)main ship, but will be able to have a few side ships; cost of these ships cannot exceed ~10% of the cost of the main ship.
But be aware that the bounty on your head will increase as you board other farmers.
You can also become a smuggler(3): (not really fleshed out here; help/ideas?)
(only possible way if you have lost all your farming bases and ships to pirates, leaving you with cargo ships only)
atm basically missions to bring stuff from point a to point b, where you need to avoid asteroid fields and pirates that try to go for your cargo and maybe fight them of to the point that you can escape(the pirates will be much stronger than you depending on the mission you’ve taken on).
Edit: You may be able to use tractor beams to salvage scrap from destroyed ships and sell the salvage at the (black)markets.
The missions themselves are also acquired from the black markets.
Which brings us to the next part(4);
you can get a bounty hunter(basically the same as the current story mode), you jump from planet to planet in order to destroy smugglers and pirates. You still need to get your parts from markets and black markets, as well as parts you got from destroyed ships, but you might also get job offers from the underground lords which can grant you pretty good weapons, money or other helpful stuff.
You can still get into debt but you will have to pay fines to the underground lords, when you don’t repay the debts within a certain time you will get a bounty on your head as well
This all has been underground, so here comes the overground(5);
you yourself become a corporate member(basically the star police), once you enter you will be granted a fairly well ship, you need to hunt down the bad crops so you need something to fight.
You also will rank up in corporate what will grant you better ships, more staff and customizability for your ships; yet you will be supposed to give back the old ship when you get a new one(basically having only one ship at a time)
From the get go you can’t change your ship, but the higher you are the more you can change until the point, as we have it now in bounty hunter, where you can give ships in order specifically to your liking.
Hyperdrive, unlike in the scenarios before is free for you, but you need to recharge your hyperdrive every now and then at markets as you won’t be getting any fuel or parts from destroyed ships(will all go to corporate)
Miscellaneous(Corporate):
You can have multiple base stations for every scenario listed, but it will get suspicious because your ships will have downtime; which may lead to suspicion with the parties you are spending the least amount of time with. They the would start to drop you and might even set a bounty on you after they have dropped you(mainly pirates and corporate).
Pirates would the just outright hunt you and close all contact with you, while corporate would keep contact with you and try to persuade you to give the ships back you got from them and go to jail for a limited amount of time(game over in this game mode)
Game overs would be;
corporate jail, as described above
main ship destroyed by pirates/bounty hunters
you lost all farming bases and ships as well as the cargo ships
This would probably also be extendable into the multiplayer with a few tweaks here and there, comments and ideas are welcome;D
Note, i know that this wont be able to be done in the near future, but might be a idea for another story mode down the line
