Only reason I said NPC SAR was because I didn't know how many people would find it fun to pick up an ejected pilot, or play the support role on a combat situation.
Well if you're already dumping merchant ships into the game that are based on carrying cargo, how much of a stretch is it to give them a tractor beam to pick up an ejected pilot?
In addition to that there are all kinds of other things you can offload to the transport though, like mobile refueling - turn your transport into a gas station and charge credits for every litre of gas you pump out to the other players.
Or a missile carrier - where your transport flies into combat loaded for bear but the fighters are actually controlling the launch of your missiles so you come in with 20 missiles and the fighters all get to ripple fire them at the oncoming wave.
Allegiance had a Gunship that was essentially the same ship as the bomber without the torpedoes, with the advantage here being that you have all the same turrets to use on a single ship.
There are a number of ways to make this both exciting and invigorating for the player.
And another one to my wishlist: An easily modifiable campaign setup for multiple players to participate. Like an old fashioned DnD game amongst friends or even shorter campaigns to get people to play together, and then those new people join up for the longer campaigns. "Dungeon Master" creates a campaign, and uploads it to a site for someone to download and host. Campaigns can vary from stories of epic proportions, a few small missions with random variables to change the missions as they're played and repeated, or maybe even a campaign that has one mission that is never ending and used for Roleplaying.
I played a Falcon 4.0 build recently that had the option to output mission setup as HTML so you could automatically upload it to your website for other pilots to download and use. Something like this would be excellent - build a strike package and operation in an external program, save off the XML. Upload it to your 'squadron' (for lack of a better term) web server for the other pilots to download a head of time, or even let them download it from you in live time (it's only XML) out of the game client.
But also some sort of on-the-fly game creation ala Never Winter Nights. Spawn a capital ship w/fighter escorts HERE for the players to fight. All though, it would be cool enough if the system was setup ala Left 4 Dead 2 and just detected where the players were and what they were doing on their mission and spawned stuff in their path to stop them.
