AeonOfTime wrote:
* Shipwrecks! Be able to track down and find ancient ships that can be salvaged entirely or only parts of. You could track them through still functioning beacons on the ship or energy signatures (star trek anyone?).
There was a thread recently discussing ship repairs, and repair bots, and someone, I can't remember who, offered the idea of necessitating spare parts, in order to do repairs; and that you'd buy spare parts in kits, but if you run out of parts and are in dire need, you could search for shipwrecks and possibly find the needed parts. I thought that was neat.
* Gas clouds: there could be gas clouds with different compositions and which can alter some of your ship's functionality like shield control, comm systems, missile guidance - you would have to plan your trip around these or take the risk to fly through. Some special equipment could diminish/negate some of these effects. And they could be pretty too
Sorry, that would ruin the game for me, since I know "gas clouds" in space are extremely thin (a handful of atoms per cubic centimeter), much clearer than the clearest view through the atmosphere by orders of magnitude. The only reason gas nebulas look like clouds through a telescope is that we are looking at dozens of light years of thickness through it. If you were inside a gas nebula, you would not know until your Astronomers got so good and knowledgeable as to be able to detect the fact from some secondary effect. In order to collect gas from a cloud, as in for fuel, you'd build scoops the size of Mars, and fly through the cloud at near the speed of light; then you might be able to fill up a bottle in a month or two.
* Be able to buy treasure maps from guys in bars (pirates! anyone?), which would mark special spots on your starcharts where a shipwreck could be or a special kind of anomaly or whatever
I actually suggested something pretty similar a few months ago: But maybe it was specific to WCU: That at pirate bases one should be able to buy treasure maps, but that they'd be ancient documents written on PAPER! and using alphanumeric star designations from way back in the third millenium. So you have to figure out what's what. But the thing is, any such piece of paper from back in the 3rd millenium is automatically assumed to mean "treasure", but more often than not, the papers are about anything but "treasures", but rather about curious planets or moons, or, occasionally, about potential spots for inducing the formation of jump-points, or about the presence of archeological finds, or resources.
As I've been saying recently, I think it would be easy to add a third "role" in Vegastrike, besides 'trader' and 'hunter': 'Explorer'. If you specialize your ship and equipment for exploration, you'd probably be interested in "treasure maps" with full awareness of their NOT being treasure maps, but because of their potential for good finds in terms of habitable planets and resource-rich asteroids.
...I've still got a few more ideas, I'll let them ripen
I once suggested to Hellcat that there should be GNN missions, to, say, take pictures of a battle or a fleet or some millionaire, or famous privateer in action, whatever. Started as a joke about Papparazzi. Also, if you happen to see some unusual fight, say confeds and insys fighting each other due to some friendly fire escalation, you could snap pictures of it and then bargain with a GNN representative over how much they are worth...
I don't know whether he's planning to do something about it or not, or whether he's forgotten about it. The possibilities are multiplicative there: You could get a reputation faster, or avoid a reputation; you could have a fight with a fleet of a faction and avoid the impact of it on your standing with that faction as long as you a) destroy all the ships, b) kill all the ejected pilots, and c) make sure there was no gnn snapping pictures around. If you know someone is a double agent, and you have pictures to prove it, you can blackmail him.
If you get too much of a reputation, you might get paparazzi following you around; but not too many factions hate them, so if you kill them it may get you in trouble. You'd wind up trying to predict and affect the presence or absence of news media depending on the mission you're doing; and in the overall, trying to avoid excessive notoriety. One strategy would be to become, oneself, a reliable gnn contributor, so as to make it a redundant option for them to send reporters to wherever you're going...
)
As a matter of fact the apparent direction, for an observer moving at a considerable fraction of the speed of light, does change ... the directions compresses to two 'poles' along the length of travel, the one in front blue-shifted, the one behind red-shifted 
anyway, I'm still a newbie but I hope to get in the action. Where do I sign up with VS? I noticed the graphics needed severe make-overs.