The question is, what do players care about, that we can put a price on it? And I've concluded, it's killing the shit out of other players, and it's staying alive. Here is a quick proposal to marry these two things together in a game mode:
Lavaland is now a hotly contested warzone, and both NT and the syndicate send combat roboters down there to fight for it's ressources. These combat roboters can be ordered, drawing from the respective department budget, and crewmembers can hop into nerve-link terminals and remote control these roboters to wage the mother of all wars down there. There are certain points on lavaland, that hold valueable ores deep underground. When you capture these points, a small mining platform will deploy from orbit and land on this point and give you money, which must be destroyed by the opposing side if they want to deploy their own platform. You can research better combat robots, weapons and upgrades from science.
I am thinking here, we could move a portion of robotics down to lavaland to maintain and repair the robots, and we could complicate weapons research a bit more by adding in a separate R&D department for weapons technology, and scientists have to test and figure out the right constellation of materials, explosives, heat absorption and so forth, to unlock all of the various weapons.
We can have traitors play a more important role, completing their objectives gives the syndicate money to fight with, plus all the sabotage they could do on the station side.
With this, we tied in:
-Economic system
-Respawn mechanic
-Combat mechs
-Antagonists
-Science rework
-Robotics rework
-Mining rework
And there is much potential for more. So, who is down to party?
