Now this is going to sound very, very ambitious to some, but here's my proposal/idea:

A top-down, space-based mod for Cortex Command, in which you command a mothership or space-station (your brain), mine gold from asteroids, and buy ships like fighters and frigates that are then produced from the mothership/station. The objective would be to destroy the enemy's command unit, like in regular CC.

Gameplay

• Start as a mothership for the faction you've selected, with a set amount of gold, maybe you could be docked to a station to begin
• Buy other ships to expand your control over the 'sector' (map)
• Mine gold from asteroids
• Defend your mothership from pirates and the enemy mothership, if there is one
• Certain units have certain weapons and targeting capabilities, IE a fighter would have forward-firing machine guns, frigates might have side-mounted cannons or missile-launchers that automatically track and fire at targets

I also have a few ideas on how this could possibly be done, and how some mechanics would work:

• Map would have to have 0 gravity and a boundary to prevent ships from just flying out of the map.
• Units would have to be set up so they don't recognize up and down somehow and don't automatically jet around and stuff.
• Movement scheme would be W and S to control thrusters, A and D to rotate left/right. The mouse controls aiming and direction on small ships like fighters, while you're given the aiming line (sharplength) on larger ships, and the guns on those ships fire at wherever the line is directed. Larger ships would only turn with A and D, but not the mouse.
• Jetpacks serve as thruster units. Smaller ships have more potent thrusters, while larger ships have weaker ones.
• Each ship has three main components: The hull (could just be the thruster's body), the thrusters, and the guns/tool (Ie diggers on a mining ship, mine-spawner on a mine-layer ship)

• Units purchased spawn at a set point near the mothership, perhaps infront of a hangar bay on the sprite somewhere.
• Units come pre-equipped with items, OR, there are sets of weapons that ships can use. Fighters might have machine guns and light missiles to choose from on purchase, and frigates might have missile launchers and cannons. Weapons are limited to their ships.

• Forming a squad will set units to fall into a formation. I'm not sure how you'd handle the formation shape/size, but I figured that you could limit fighter squads to 5 (one in the center, 4 on each corner). I'm not sure about other ships.
• Unit commands would probably work normally, with some exceptions. Mining would only work on miner ships, brain-hunt would work on all ships (If no weapon, ram into the mothership to explode and do damage). Setting a ship to patrol would have it fly around in a large circle.
• Ramming enemy ships with your own would make both them explode. Hitting your own ships however, just causes them to overlap/go through eachother.

Map layout

• You'd start out docked to or near a station probably made out of the concrete/metal materials, kinda like a normal bunker.
• Your station would have modules similar to the rocket/drop-ship dock that would passively repair damage to your ships when they're attached
• The primary 'terrain' of the map would be asteroids, and alternatively, spacejunk like torn up stations and derelict ships.
• Gold is located in asteroids and derelict mining ships
• I figure that your enemy could be positioned to your north (onscreen), and you to the south/at the bottom.
• As for the background, you could probably get away with using the menu screen's space background.
• Asteroids could probably be drawn with dirt and bedrock, regular rocks could probably be thrown in to add some goldless debris

I'm not a great coder and I can't sprite things and get them into the game (Having a bug, think it's my image editors, or my computer), so I'm just putting this idea out there for anyone who's interested. I think it'd be a pretty cool addition to the game, seeing as space-travel is a pretty heavy element in the story.

To be honest this sounds like a really goddamn good idea wow how did u come up with this svendice

Heh, I've had the exact same idea as this. The problem is feasability and the amount of work this would require. The sprites and the ini code are a big job, but that's not even touching on the amount of lua work that will need to go into the activity and the AI (you won't be able to use the base AI files for something like this).

So while I do think it's possible, it would be a lot of hard work. I might take a stab at it, sometime after I at least finish up some of my half dozen WIP mods (which at my current work pace should be sometime in 2020 at the earliest )

Frankly, with the sheer amount of work involved? You'd probably be better off just making a whole new game. That way you could actually have much finer control over the actor types and what they can do, rather than having to mash everything together using Lua and ACRockets.

Painful, sure. But it'd likely save you a lot of headaches from trying to coax CC into working the way you want it to.

That sounds kinda like void wanders.

For the most part, a lot of your issues are probably going to come from things like having to completely rewrite the AI.

Past that, everything else seems to have been done before, or haven't really been all that explored.

• Weegee is the premiere Activity/Map Maker. If you look at a lot of his maps, you see that there are a lot of placeable AI nodes that he uses to make make pathfinding more convenient for the AI, and so on. He also does a lot of menu work in his activites, too.
• As far as the control scheme, you are going to have to use Grif's, or Abdul's respective Plane Mods, their ships throttle and steer accordingly.
• I think the Death Bees mod is Polleste Nectare or something. The Bees are technically just glorified MOPixels that float around an invisible, flying actor, but I tihnk you could expand upon that as necessary. Regardless, this all hinges upon how big the fighters/frigates there are

Anyways, I agree with the above, it'd be better to simply make your own god damn game, but whatever.
You are pretty much suggesting some form of "Blue Libra"-ish game, but with actual resource management, and probably station construction, but wouldn't necessarily be a good idea to use retro-pixel terrain destruction in that case.

If you don't like either option, wait until Datarealms releases Crush2D, it is probably better than Cortex COmmand for what you are thinking of by a long shot, and by several orders of magnitude.