The medical CSCs (Arctica and Sahara) should give out missions, mostly geared towards helping refugees and civilians. These missions should count towards rank.
Some ideas:
- An epidemic has broken out in the system and the player must find the source in order to develop a vaccine. We randomly choose an enemy station to be the source. When the player destroys the enemy station, they get a sample to take back to the CSC to develop the vaccine. To figure out which enemy station is the source, the player visits friendly stations to see their infection rate. The closer they are to the source, the higher the rate.
- A politician from St. Katharine's Star is visiting to take stock of the ongoing war. The player must escort their ship to the carrier. There's a chance that a spy in the politician's party gives away the CSC location; in that case, the CSC is attacked once the player arrives.
- Refugees from another system are coming to a Commonwealth station, but fringe settlers allied with the Rogue Fleet want to prevent them from coming. The player must destroy a Rogue Fleet blockade before the refugee convoy arrives.
How about a heavy freighter of refugees has gone missing? It would be stuck somewhere in-system and the player would have to find it. This could involve manual searching, using a device to track signal strength, following rumors on friendly stations, or raiding a Rogue Fleet station to check their logbooks. On finding the ship, it might be being held by enemy ships (similar to how Centauri raiders hold mining ships), or just disabled by a freak accident; drive off the enemies and/or repair the ship and then escort it home.
Perhaps a station has been recently destroyed and the CSC is working on ferrying off survivors to another system. They're drafting every civilian ship they can find to improve their cargo capacity. This would involve sending a convoy of disparate ships, some military, some civilian, from the CSC to the wrecked station. Everyone docks, takes on as many passengers as they can fit in their hold, then goes back to the CSC, with potential attacks by enemy ships on both legs of the journey.
This could interact with Teraton Research somehow - maybe the CSC could ask the player to go to a Teraton nest with research to acquire some item that the Teratons will not just trade with a CSC?
@viperion: Great idea! I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!
@derakon: Love the idea of a signal tracking device. This might teach players about that mechanic prior to the Heretic mission where you look for a gravitational anomaly.