Check out what Istvan Jumpgate Evolution developer has to say about this topic in his Development bulletin 4#: Capital Ships
Since various interviews, dev chats, and columns on gaming sites have now either hinted about or openly mentioned this topic, I think it will no longer come as a surprise to anyone that the development team has plans to put capital ships in JGE. Scorch had wanted capital ships even "back in the day", but development resources were so thin for JGC post-release that such a large project was never tackled. JGE's AI system, though, is the real factor that allowed us to realize that we could indeed put capital ships into the game.
The conflux hives in JGC were a preliminary experiment I conducted a few years ago to explore putting turret AI objects on a larger body. I knew I couldn't implement capital ships myself, but thought that AI-defended static objects might be possible within the old codebase. New work already done for JGE can now perform the same task, and gets vastly better results with none of the flaws seen in the JGC implementation. The same handlers for turrets on a static base object can be used to place turrets on a mobile object, and lo and behold, the result would be a capital ship AI object. We have thus far only completed a static proof-of-concept, but it works very well and we have some confidence that by extension, mobile capital ships can be done.
At present, we are only seriously considering non-player capital ship implementations. Players will not fly them, nor man them directly. JGE is still a game about fighter combat, and about flying your own ship. Though we've certainly thought about some of the technical issues involved with making multi-player ships possible, we have to draw the line somewhere, so that the game can be released within our intended timeframe. The capital ships and armed bases that we initially implement will exist principally as target assets, to add flavor to dogfights, to finally give bomber class ships their true role, and to give players the ability to participate in action with a larger feel than a fighter engagement alone.
We have every intention that capital ships and armed bases will have both PvE and PvP implementations. Capital ships and bases are likely mission targets for PvE action, for both solo and group play. For PvP, we want squads to be able to arm and thus defend destructible (or at least damageable to the point of inoperability) base facilities in unregulated space, as well as to fight for control over AI-defended strongpoints. The more extreme possibilities that we're considering would include implementing tools that allow some pilots with extremely high ratings with nations or subfactions, or possibly even leaders of squads, to call in and deliver general orders to capital ships owned by those organizations, offering limited player control over these assets in PvP battles.
Right now, much of this is tantamount to speculation, as all we have completed is the static proof-of-concept. We have no sense yet of how many of these design ideas can or will be in-game by release. However, this should provide some sense of the direction we're taking, and may prove to be a foretaste of the kind of content the JGE team could be working on post-release.
