Ok, yes, I know aetherships are meant to be operated by full crews of people, but sometimes that's just not possible, and I would really like to see some ability for a lone Captain to be able to take his ship out and do something.

Essentially, you'd have to buy small remote nodes at the aetherplex store. These could either be 1-time buys that are very expensive, or, things that decay in an IC month, or some other short timeframe. The Captain of the ship goes and attaches them to whichever modules he wants.

The catch is, to activate and control them, the Captain cannot be locked into a module themselves. So if you want to use an automated empath grid, you have to also pay to automate the command chair.

What this allows is for only the basic skills in Aethercraft to be used. The Captain loses access to any of the skills in his specialization, and is stuck with everything working on normal balance.

The Captain would then be able to order the use of all basic Aethercraft skills. As soon as he ACTIVATE REMOTE to turn the nodes on, he would be linked in to the ship's channel, from where he could order movement, healing, repair, energy & resource collection, and trade. The nodes would respond to their orders with "Firing." or "Moving" or whatever, and would speak again when they were ready. You could also order them as a whole or individually to "run silent" ("Command Run Silent" for example would allow you to order the ship to move without a "Moving" "Command ready" following each movement)

XP for kills would also receive a penalty roughly the same, or just sliiightly larger than having a crew of an equal size.

With a decent cost in gold, or even if this was a set of artifacts that cost a decent ammount of credits, I think it would allow ships to be useful even during down hours, while not allowing them to run at anything close to full efficiency, given that the Captain has to give -all- orders and has no access to anything beyond what is in the base skillset.

I'm suggesting this because I know that I would invest in a ship if I could just be sure that I could use it during off hours to do more than exploring.

I think it'd be funny to have something controlling the chair. You'd never know where it would go!

And this was actually suggested at the town hall meeting, I laid out a decent system for auto modules, when they'd work, when they would not, and what kind of drawbacks they would have. I don't think the idea has had any support thus far.

Meh. I just hate the fact that it isn't a sound investment to buy a ship because even if I was to gather a good crew, if my hours ever become sporadic, my chance of being able to fly the damn thing drops significantly.

I just want to be able to have fun with the gnome trading once in a while without the hassle of a full crew

Maybe we could at least have random aetherial dust pockets that you could mine? That'd fix my issues with the system all by itself.

I don't have a ship myself. Still, what's to stop you from just taking your ship out on your own? You wouldn't be able to hunt in aetherspace or anything, but there are plenty of pilots who make it to aetherbubbles solo on a pretty regular basis. If you want to hunt or explore aetherspace, then you'd have to gather a crew. I think the whole idea is that it would be really overpowered for a single person to be able to go out and hunt aetherbeasts without a very large XP reduction. It would also not be great for the economy for any individual to be able to go out and run around aetherspace and get gold from trading. It seems like that would kind of defeat the purpose of aetherspace...

Also, I understand suggesting some restrictions, like losing specialization skills, but really I don't think many specialization skills are used all that much anyway, besides pilot and maybe empath.