4Game

Pretty self explanatory, if I own 4 ships and have 3 hired NPC Pilots, I should be able to form a wing and use them in combat, perhaps other activities like Mining or Trading.

This however should have some limitations to try to balance it out:

Assign ships a point value and have a limit on how many points your NPC Wing can be. So for example you shouldn't be able to have 4 Corvettes in a Wing but you could have 4 Vipers. I think point values should be granular but basically you should be able to have a Wing of 4 small ships, 2 Medium ships or a Large + Small. Perhaps have the total size of your NPC Wing scale with your Combat rank, with Elite rank giving you the most points for forming a NPC Wing.

Your NPC Pilot Rank could also scale with the size of ship they can fly. Lower ranks can only fly small ships while Deadly/Elite can fly large ones.

SLFs can't be used in an NPC Wing. I think using an NPC Wing replaces the function of using SLFs so it's probably best to not be able to mix them. HOWEVER, I think if this idea was a reality, I don't think there is any reason why we shouldn't be able to finally have 2 NPCs in SLFs at a time when not in a NPC Wing.

If this idea still sounds overpowered for Open, perhaps limit it to Solo/PG.

Bonuses to this idea:

Being able to mix and match ships to form your own wing will allow us to experiment further with loadouts while theorycrafting different Wing configurations will lead to more game time for players.

Has the potential to sell more ship paints. If I had a Wing of 4 Vipers, I would want each one to be a different color. This idea literally has the potential to sell 4x as many ship paints so players can color their wing. Same thing with engine and weapons colors.

I think this would be a neat idea to really spice up the Space Combat gameplay of the game while using an already existing function (NPCs being part of a Wing controlling SLFs) and controls (Flight Orders) to utilize parked ships and our 3 NPC Pilots slots.