one of the biggest issues I tend to run into when playing with odyssey content tends to be how there is a distinct separation between the space born game and the on foot elements. part of this is understandable by design, separating missions involving on foot content to the in station terminals results in a easy to separate mission pool allowing players to choose the specific content they'd like to explore, reducing the risk of accidentally being in the wrong kind of ship or having the wrong tools for the task at hand.
this makes some sense from a design standpoint but it causes significant issues for the overall immersion of the game and the long term integration of odyssey and the wider elite experience.
while I'm sure this has been done to death MANY times I think some work on the mission system as a whole would go a long way to helping bridge the experience between what currently sits as a very separate pair of gameplay options.
there's a few ways this can be approached, in an ideal world having longer form missions involving elements of both on foot and in space assets would be ideal but I'm unclear if the current system can handle a multi-waypoint approach in this manner. a better solution, then, would be to take advantage of a rather underused system which we already have in the game, Chained missions.
we occaisonally see the ping come through after a successful bounty hunt in space, where we've been given the wrong target (because, oops?) and are provided with a secondary objective. could this system be expanded further?
for example, I've just completed a bounty hunting mission, space side, for a target… on returning to station however it appears that significant information has been uncovered from the pirates flight recorder (recovered post operation) that has indicated a staging base for the [insert colour here] syndicate. you are then provided with a mission to raid the base and recover some key data from their command center, this in turn leads to the location of a pirate convoy carrying illegal materials which you must now intercept.
it's a basic example but provides a means by which we can connect and integrate the two "legs" of the Elite experience, sometimes putting you in space and other times putting you on the ground, it potentially creates new requirements for "all in one" style mission ships as opposed to building purely specialised dogfighters or exploration vessels.
I suspect I'm not treading any new ground (durr hurr) but it does seem like a decent method to start bridging the gap using the basic tools we already have in place?
for some more wildcard ideas however, because some long term speculative hype is also fun to think about:
locating derelict stations/megaships out in the black, docking with the stations provides an opportunity for reward… but on landing and turning on some systems you've suddenly caught someone's attention (lean into the horror potential odyssey clearly has thanks to it's thematic lighting and "power management" systems built into bases. Pirate raiders or… something else?)
while travelling through space you locate some wreckage, recovering data from the wreck you find some coordinates indicating a hidden base just outside the bubble, dare you pursue?
