Disclaimer: I know I use the term Zero-G kind of loosely, but bear with me, if you're reading this, you get what I mean.
Rather than making an actual request, I'm sort of just throwing this idea out there. I just think this is a neat idea and someone more able of doing more than sprites would want to consider it.

I was fiddling around with Cortex Command today and thought "Wouldn't it be fun to have space based version of this with zero G?"

So I started thinking of how it would work. Of course all the essentials are there: Thrust, mass, inertia, and debris. The only thing that would need to be done away with is the omnipresent downward force representing gravity. I say 'only' like that'd be an easy thing, but I really don't know. Space stations or capital ships would of course be represented by a set of bunker tiles or entities with a few optional components.

I presume attack craft fabrication would have to be the next thing, as orbital drops no longer apply. There's always the possibility of the AI flying a ship in from the closest side of the map, but that may prove more trouble for the players than it's worth.

Lastly some kind of boarding mechanic may be good for the gameplay. Basically, space is a vacuum and any actor not outfitted with the proper equipment, be it a fishbowl or an envirosuit, will not be able to survive the trip from one ship/station to the other on their own, it essentially means instant death. Luckily, the ships are all pressurized. Depressurization is optional, should anyone choose to undertake this as a project, I don't think that's the first thing they should get going, then again I've got a track record of 0 mods for 0 games going, so don't let me stop you. I'll come back to it a little later on.
So, you still make use of transport ships, I can think of two varieties: Standard transport with pickup/dropoff functions, best for when you have access to the destination ship's docking bay. Crash pods, also pretty straight forward, like a drop pod used to smash through the hull of a ship and deploy soldiers.
Once aboard, the soldiers need to seek out the ship's commander and 'relieve' them. Reminiscent of standard brain hunting.

Other things to consider:

• The vacuum of space. I don't know how you'd simulate this, but the best way, I think, to handle whether it affects actors is with a 1 or 0 value based on the actor's equipment or type. Any actor caught in the vacuum without the equipment/value needed would simply explode.
  
• Going hand in hand with the above, atmospheric evacuation. If there's a gaping hole in the hull of a ship, the air in that section's gonna get sucked out, along with anything not nailed down, or, again, with the right equipment. There's two lazy ways out of this. The ship allegedly has force fields capable of maintaining atmospheric pressure, or everything exposed directly to space becomes a vacuum zone.
  
• Again, related: Vacuum Equipment. This bulky apparatus would be like an E.V.A. pack, allowing the user to move more precisely by dampening inertia where needed, and providing survivable conditions in the vacuum. In simulated gravity environments, this gear would be pretty hefty, so they may need to drop it once safely onboard a ship. The idea is that this would be useful equipment for any mod based actors not originally intended for use with a space mod.
  
• A quick and dirty way to handle gravity: Just find a way to make specific actors immune to gravity completely, this ensures that ships intended for space will have no trouble moving about and behave as realistically as they can in the given conditions. Mind you, it'll be a little off putting if a green clone falls out of a ship when a fighter's gracefully dancing around in space.

Again, if anyone decides to take this up, and you need a spriter, look no further, I can sprite things. Of course I can't guarantee it'll retain the same style or quality as Cortex Command's already existing assets, but I don't think it'll be too bad.

I can't help with the suffocation and all that fancy stuff but you can easily make the maps zero-g by opening the .ini file and changing the lines;
GlobalAcceleration = Vector
X = 0
Y = 20
To:
GlobalAcceleration = Vector
X = 0
Y = 0 //20
The //20 is just a comment so you know what the default value was, not necessary but good in case you want to change it back later.

Edit: Went ahead and made a zero-g version of all stock maps, it's in the minor mod dump viewtopic.php?p=444744#p444744

Well the idea was more for actual space themed content as well, and more having selective gravity aboard ships rather than none at all.

There was this mod Mehman made, which were Zero-G Generators. I've also made my own Zero-G generators, and you can easily cover specific areas with it. The only problem is that it can get laggy with many actors/particles/weapons in it. You could make a small map, or make enemies spawn less.

In that way, you cover everything except, for example, spacecrafts. At the doors of spacecrafts, you could have a dispenser with a TDExplosive that could be thrown and an attachable would stick to actors (for example an astronaut helmet), then you can jump into the zero-g area and the area would check if you have the attachable attached or not. If you have it attached, you survive, if not, you get gibbed. But because I'm not sure if you can attach attachables, you can just make it check if it has the TDExplosive in it's inventory or not.

You could even make only specific guns work in space, because I suppose you can't fire a regular gun in space. Lasers, harpoons, rockets, those would work, I guess.

Hmm... the dispenser idea would probably work if there's an airlock system too.

I'm imagining a scene where there's two ships, with boarding pods and stuff. The outer hulls are impermeable except for the parts which can be 'boarded', and there are airlocks. The whole scene is 0G, except for the insides of the ship, which could work like Hydro Mod's underwater 'cave' thingies. And then there's the airlocks, which would 'switch' between 0 and 1 gravity when it's open a certain way. It should look like 2 doors... and when the airlocks are breached, the ship would probably lose its artificial gravity.
There could be a problem with surviving in space; robot actors don't gib when they're exposed to space, but human actor might. So there may be one big list like Tartarus or Unmapped Lands detailing which actors would survive vacuum or not...

You wouldn't spontaneously explode when exposed to space anyway. You wouldn't freeze, either.

You would, however, pass out within around 10-15 seconds and die within around 90, without an air supply.

The 'accurate' thing to do would be to have the actor's health start draining and jam the controls after a few seconds, and then just have them ragdoll off into space.

So there's some science for you.

Also, a lot of actors (eg; Coalition mooks) already have helmets. Having them with goldfish bowl space helmets on top of those could look pretty ridiculous.

There isn't some way to just select the 'class' of actor, I suppose? Like robots don't have a particular behavioral controller separate from clones? If someone could call that when determining which actors die, that would shorten the need for a list somewhat and make mod infantry more viable without any end user modification required.

As for ship damage, I'd imagine you'd be able to destroy an enemy ship with the right amount of firepower, but that would be like on the level of cataclysmic system failure kind of damage. The only problem I have with that is that a player could just nuke a threat into oblivion without a thought with some of the mods floating around, there's no real downside to it. Granted, nukes are typically packaged as ships, it would probably be prudent to disallow standard ships and only be able to produce the ones specific to the scenario. That way any nukes would have to be manually placed by an actor, so there's still a game to it.
Including a system of built in 'weak points' would probably be the best option, keeping in mind that the big weakpoints are viewports, doors, and emplacements built onto the hull. This could be done by giving the player a beginning budget and a ship/station too large to armor all of.



Explosive decompression Total Recall style is more fun, IMO. But that gives the added bonus of allowing actors to make a last stand if a part of a ship gets evacuated.

You can check if in the name of the actor there is a certain word, for example "Robot", "Dummy", "MPAM", "MARS", etc.

Sounds like a good project, and I could help you with it, but I'd have to learn on mission making, task I haven't completed yet.