Defendinatley as a replacement, with all the new OXPs the Classic Ships look a bit poor in compasion.
I'd like to see the Long Range Cruiser from FFE. Scripted to appear near the station and high tech worlds and maybe very rarley in the space lanes with a wing of Frontier ships as escorts!
I have a plan for Assassins2 to arm one of these with a proto-type plasma accelerator. Think I can do this by placing a lot of laser mounting points very close together in a ring to give a thick beam that causes massive damage!
Should be dotted with lots of turrets too! Maybe lots of left, right and rear Thargoid Lasers with orange beams on lots of mounting points to simulate 4Mw turrets!
OXPS : The Assassins Guild, Asteroid Storm, The Bank of the Black Monks, Random Hits, The Galactic Almanac, Renegade Pirates can be downloaded from the Elite Wiki here.
Also what's the average spec of most peoples machines, can I go crazy on the models and textures or do we still need the replacements to be conservative?
Well Ramon my best machine is an Athlon XP2500+ with 768MB PC2700 and a 128MB AGP 8x GF FX5600 - so well down the food chain in terms of performance compared to modern machines.
I've got a baby on the way too - so no upgrades!
If somebody wanted to make the old ships all singing and dancing that would be fine - just do the same as the Dark Wheel CMKIII - normal and HiRes in two seperate oxps - that way if you've got a slow machine you leave well alone, a bit faster machine you try the new machines and if you've got a good machine then you go for the full-bling option.
I think from a graphics point of view may be that not a lot of older cards accelerate OpenGL as well as they do for M$ DX due to manufacturers (especially ATi) not writing good OpenGL drivers (I couldn't play Quake 3 on my Rage 128 but had no problems with a GF2 or a Voodoo5)
