@Deus:
Well I'm going to make a little detour into Philosophy, here.
Suppose I asked you what's the opposite of a heavy, hot, black sphere?
Answers could range from,
- A light, hot, black sphere.
- A heavy, cold, black sphere.
- A heavy, hot, white sphere.
As long as you change one attribute to its opposite, you could think of the result as "an opposite". In other words, when we think of opposites, we think of very similar things, really, with one opposing attribute.
A light, cold and white pyramid glued into a crocodile skin shoe doesn't seem at all like "the opposite" of a heavy, hot, black sphere. It just seems totally unrelated.
Well, something similar applies to a modification of an existing complex thing, like a game. The last thing you want your remake or expansion to be said to be is "unrelated" to the original game. That would in fact the worst possible criticism that could be leveled at a remake or expansion of a classical game.
If all things are basically the same, but you have a lot of new ships, it's easy to see this as an expansion.
Or if all things are the same but you have new missions and plots, it also feels like an expansion.
Even if you have new ships AND new missions, it may still feel like an expansion, provided the new ships appear gradually and in low numbers; and provided that the new plots are kind of hidden and hard to find.
But if you have new missions on your face AND new ships galore AND you can own many ships AND the computers at the bases look different AND you see less Draymans around than in the original game AND some stations have defensive turrets AND there are turbolasers you can buy which weren't in the original game AND the retros now fly Kukhris AND militias sometimes have Paradigms AND there's a new AWACS communist faction AND the jump drive is locked up until you complete a mission AND there's autotracking for forward guns AND you can fly Ferrets AND the best ship is the Demon rather than the Centurion AND the moon around Eden is an actual moon you can land on AND ... AND ... AND ... Then finally we got hardly a resemblance to the original game; and the whole mod seems totally unrelated to the original game.
So we're actually trying to begin a backtracking process, get rid of useless and non-canonical items such as repulsor beams, get rid of the ability to suck other ships using tractor beams, get rid of the ability to free slaves, get rid of the vast proliferation of ship variants... We're trying to get back to the basics. Only leave deviations from canon that actually make the game a better game without changing the look and feel of the original too much.
There's always people that whenever an idea pops into their heads they go "wouldn't it be cool if..." and want some new weapon, new ship, new feature... and they push and push... won't stop arguing until they see their brilliant idea implemented; and all these
wouldnitbecool's accumulate over time and add up to a layer of fat that's hard to get rid of. We're going for a liposuction right now, which is an expensive procedure; so your suggesting new fat is not likely to get anywhere at this time.
Indeed you should play the game; then play all the other WC games, then watch all the WCAcademy episodes, then read all 9 WC novels, and you'll get an idea of the amounts and strengths of canon we're dealing with. Heck, there's a statue of a ship in an episode of WCAcademy that people to this day argue whether it's a Hellcat V, which would imply it was produced much earlier than hinted elsewhere; or a Wildcat, which was a pre-war ship mentioned in the novel Action Stations but was never seen in any games. Personally, I think it's a Corsair, which was supposed to be the replacement to the Wildcat. But no, having a permanent squadron that follows you around could be done in a new game in the WC universe, perhaps; but it would be absurd in a Privateer expansion. Your character in Privateer, Grayson Burrows, is a loner, and an unsung hero who, in trying to make money, ends up breaking a corporate blockade, defeating a mafia, saving a scientist from forced captivity, expanding the fronteers, elliminating a drone that was destroying Confederate fleets left and right, defeating a kilrathy fleet, wiping out a corruption ring and preventing a civil war; gets a Medal of Valour from the Confederation, and then chooses to go back to being a nobody privateer. He's not the type to be leading a squadron everywhere he goes, even if the engine would support it.
All I want to know is, would it be possible to make ship deliveries be simulated by the engine?