tl;dr: Stations take ‘damage’ over time, players can take missions to repair the damage. This is NOT destroyable stations.

Gameplay Summary:
* Stations take ‘damage’ over time, degrading from 100% down to 1%. It could be the stations as a whole, or different modules of the station take more or less damage. Damage done could be from weapons fire, ship collision, sector-based damage over time.
* Pilots can repair the damage using a repair beam, a new item that only works on stations. I’m imagining either a mission tree where stations ask a pilot to procure repair materials, then hand the pilot the beam and it gets taken away when the mission is turned in, OR it’s a new item that runs on a fuel source (ie has ammo).
* Under the hood, it would basically be the stations, or station modules, can be targetable and something the like the asteroid heat system would be in place to increase the station health back to 100%.
* Lore Premise: Micrometeorites, stray weapons fire, ship collisions, and cosmic radiation eventually damage stations and they need to be repaired. Considering the tone of some of the manufacturing missions (ie ‘we’re mostly ignored by the Capital, we’re scrappy and barely making it’), this fits in with the need to have players helping out.

Pros/Cons/Thoughts
* Is it fun? Maybe. I think people would do it if it paid well enough. It has some role-playing potential.
* It would encourage people to travel around, since once a station is repaired it wouldn’t need more repairs for a while.
* It would be somewhat self regulating. Stations in grey or low-populated areas would probably be repaired less often which means higher payouts for the people that are willing to travel or take the risk.
* It’s not really a new activity, more like a reskin of mining.
* Could be a stepping stone towards destructable/manufacturable stations.

+1

Would stations lose different services as the damage worsens? It would add some more incentives to repair them.

Why avoid the existing repair gun?

"Why avoid the existing repair gun"

I was guessing at what stations are currently closest too in engine. If stations are currently more like asteroids, adjusting the heat system and mining beams would probably be less work to get implementing. If stations are closer to ships then the repair gun would be fine.
The only maybe real gameplay reason to have separate items would be to balance station health separately from ship health. IE, if this is a system that would be in place for destroyable stations, you'd probably want the stations to have at least as much hp as a HAC, which would take forever to repair with a repair gun.

So...these stations reduce health, but are never destroyed. So what motivation is there to repair it? Also, this would need not "as much as an HAC" but atleast 100x as much as an HAC. Atleast.

haha, right on sid. -1 to this big time

So what motivation is there to repair it?

Janitorial supplies is a commodity in VO. Things need maintenance. I could easily imagine that working on a station could be another way for a pilot to gain factional standing without the use of trade guild/scrap yard missions.

Hm, the point of 'how do you explain the damage being on a percentage scale without having the station be destructible' is a fair point. I think inverting it, and stations start at zero damage and just accumulate damage would solve that issue. That would make the mission pay based on the damage removed. Going this route means there would probably need to be a rate limit that weapons fire and ship collisions can cause damage, and/or there may need to be a damage cap to prevent a single mission from distributing a billion credits.

And you could easily have people who shoot the station on one alt and repair on the other. Farm credits and standing afk.

The damage could be from solar radiation and not player activity. The repair could be individual panels, so the pilot would need to move around, thus afking would be impossible/improbable.

Sounds like a great way to AFK farm a bunch of credits with free accounts.

This idea keeps getting worse and worse.

I mean there's straightforward ways to mitigate/reduce AFK exploitation.

* Players wouldn't be able to see the actual damage numbers on a station, the station would just offer the mission.
* Mission pay doesn't increase if damage is taken after the mission is started
* Rate limit the damage a player can do to a station at 1 per minute, up to 60 per 24 hours.
* Attacking the station triggers a strikeforce and TKOS like attacking another player in the sector.
* Players can only take the mission once per 6-12 hours. Meaning if you're trying to farm up damage on a station, someone else can just come along and do the repairs instead.

My only criticism of this idea is that it is currently unattached to any of the game’s existing gameplay loops without being enough to be its own gameplay loop. The reason this matters in my mind is that currently, if a player is grinding pretty much anything, even rep, some other relevant skills will increase (and theoretically, the player gets real practice of a sort with that skill).

For example:

If you’re doing rep, you gain trading standing and can eventually pick up on some decent trade runs/tendencies of the in game economy.
If you’re doing prospecting missions, that same info (if you have targetless or something similar) is at your disposal.
If you’re doing manufacturing, pretty much every aspect of that is trade, combat, or mining related.
Even if you’re doing fetch quests you go between stations and are sort of involved with the game world - there’s often combat or buying goods from different locations.

As proposed I think these missions need to be ingrained into one or more of the current gameplay loops, or be expanded upon so much so as to be its own. FWIW I do like it!

i think everyone should get a daily credit reward for logging in todo this

If it didn't actually damage the station, why would you call it damage?

In this suggestion "damage" means "opportunity to farm credits with rep addons". Why not create this situation in the roving convoys instead, where the possibly for accruing damage already exists? Make the unrats capable of killing / damaging capital ships, and make the repairing of those ships something that pays?

Then they are a moving target and you can't just sit there with your AFK bot account #304 and multibox AFK credit farm.

Maybe make the mission count towards some 'station mechanic' badge. Then make available a better repair turret, something actually useful with active turrets.