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 Activity/Scene-Based Problem... Spawn Brain, Paint Map, Spawn other things...)
• Buy other ships to expand your control over the 'sector' (map) Issue is ordering the ships/ai :v
• Mine gold from asteroids Issue is how to deal with no gravity, and free flying space debris
• Defend your mothership from pirates and the enemy mothership, if there is one AI/etc Issue
• 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 You'd have to inest in some actor/ai scripting to do this

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. Not that hard, Gravity's in scene's ini, boundaries can be imposed by x/ywrap, or barriers that are defined in the scene's activity.lua
• Units would have to be set up so they don't recognize up and down somehow and don't automatically jet around and stuff. Make your own AI from scratch, thankfully 2d free axial movement is comparatively easy compared to bipedal movement
• 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. Look at Grif's plane, and Air Support Mod for this :v
• Jetpacks serve as thruster units. Smaller ships have more potent thrusters, while larger ships have weaker ones. Your choice of ini or lua here
• 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) Be careful with destructible jetpacks, and ♥♥♥♥ like that, it caused crashes for Zombies '09, but again, ini or lua, here

• Units purchased spawn at a set point near the mothership, perhaps infront of a hangar bay on the sprite somewhere. This would probably have to use an exploit much like what Air Support, and Mehman's Deliery Cannon does to get deliveries to spawn where they shouldn't
• 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. You'd probably use a combination of weegee's Void Wanderer Menus, or Air Support's UAV Spawn-in weapon designator here

• 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. You could do something like TLB's Death Bees mod when it comes to Actor Swarms, or something, in which multiple "bodies" are part of an actor, and damage to the actor causes the 'bodies' to fizzle out, but that's a hack and a half.
• 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. Again, you'll have to rewrite the ai to do this
• Ramming enemy ships with your own would make both them explode. Hitting your own ships however, just causes them to overlap/go through eachother. CC physics is bull♥♥♥♥ at best, so best of luck here, probably going to need more scripts to do this

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. Ok
• Your station would have modules similar to the rocket/drop-ship dock that would passively repair damage to your ships when they're attached This is probably just a "search for x actors of y team, if so, heals" script, not hard.
• The primary 'terrain' of the map would be asteroids, and alternatively, spacejunk like torn up stations and derelict ships. Either Paint a map, or make a lua script that spawns the debris and auto settles them.
• Gold is located in asteroids and derelict mining ships Ok
• I figure that your enemy could be positioned to your north (onscreen), and you to the south/at the bottom. Again, same issues
• As for the background, you could probably get away with using the menu screen's space background. Not that hard to do
• Asteroids could probably be drawn with dirt and bedrock, regular rocks could probably be thrown in to add some goldless debris Not that crazy.

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.