Perhaps this has been suggested before, but I could not find it on the forums. I think it would be fun if ships could tow a single unpiloted ship. This makes moving around less of a hassle, because you can for example always bring a shuttle, a travel ceptor or whatever with you.
Perhaps it would be fun if other players could bump the tow loose, or shoot it and get a suspect timer. Even mission objectives could be build around that. There are many potential mechanics to think about in this regard, and I think it would be fun. A number of constraints can easily be added to this mechanic of course. I am curious to know what others think. Thank you.
This said, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for larger ship classes like Battle cruisers and Battle ships to get a shuttle bay just for a shuttle.
It would probably see shuttles get a lot more use, and make sense. At least one model has a visible shuttle bay.
If a shuttle isn’t much faster then it wouldn’t make much difference, but it would add variety & flavour between shuttles, corvettes & pods. Right now shuttles hardly see use.
Pod can be used to travel, but you risk getting killed and ending up at your medical clone location.
A corvette can be used for extra survivability of your pod, because then people need to kill you twice instead of once. Although it is free, the corvettes are really slow for travelling because of their bad align time and warp of only 3 AU/s.
A shuttle protects your pod from being instantly killed, while allowing you to fly at 5 AU/s and 2s align time. Perfect for travel, if you don’t need to avoid bubbles and smartbombs. In the case you do need to avoid those, grab a travel-fit interceptor.
Travelceptors are usually your best option to get somewhere alive, but the downside is that they don’t fit in a cargo bay of other ships as easily, require more skills and cost more ISK than shuttles. So if you can’t fit one of those or aren’t willing to risk that extra ISK, bring a packaged shuttle.