Summary: Provide a mechanism for players to recover the kill marks of a destroyed ship
The basic mechanism would a ‘transponder’ item that the player would apply to a ship of the same type. Applying the item would set the ship’s name, skin and killmarks to that of the destroyed ship. This item is only usable by the pilot of the destroyed ship.
How to retrieve the destroyed ships transponder?
The easiest way would be to create an insurance-like service. Boring, but probably easy.
More fun would an exploration game where the destroyed ship generates an exploration site that has to be scanned down and hacked. This would open up the option for others to beat you there and either camp the site or hack it and ransom the transponder. I suppose that this would require some sort of limit (minimum kills? an item that has to be applied to the ship beforehand?) to keep a big fleet fight from turning a system into a complete mass of sites.
You could paint new killmarks on a new hull based on the amount of killmarks you had on a previous hull, but what’s the point of that? Just blow up a few T1 frigates if you really want those killmarks back.
Sure, and I’m sure people do that. This just seemed more fun. Like creating a storied series of ships sharing the same name. I also kind of liked the exploration & ransom aspect.
The idea of kill marks is that it’s a fun way to track of how many kills your current hull made.
Kill marks have no value, except whatever you think they’re worth. You could of course cheat it by blowing up a few cheap T1 frigates of an alt. ‘Killmark recovery’ feels like another way to cheat kill marks, and as such not something the game needs. You can already cheat kill marks if you want to go back at your previous kill mark score if you wanted.
Or just play the game and get new kill marks on your new hull.
