Yes, there are pirates, and they hunt you down. Trouble is, space is big, and you're likely to be long gone before they get anywhere near you. While Pioneer has a factions system, it is fairly new and nothing has been built upon it yet. The system generation system is due for a rewrite, to allow for better government selection, etc.
I'd aim for better consistency between planets, atmospheres and biospheres, first and foremost, because it sucks ATM (for example you won't be getting anything that's less massive than gas giant that's both hot or even warm and has hydrogen atmosphere because the hydrogen will just achieve escape velocity via temperature alone).
Would also love to see some volumetric clouds as well as procedural landscape objects. Maybe city terrain type as well as cities just vanish when seen from distance, which shouldn't be the case on heavily populated worlds.
Maybe airlock landing pads on airless bodies - would hate to leave my ride outside when going for beer, only to discover it got smashed by empty fuel someone left cruising at orbital velocity.
I would imagine changing in and from spacesuit only to leave the ship is going to be annoying.
That's odd about not encountering any pirates, I could easily track their intercepts and also make surface to inbound freighter intercept manually in Frontier which was similar mechanically so it shouldn't be much of a problem for an AI ship to intercept. Maybe pirate intercept behaviour and loads should be tweaked to better cope with more limited fuel/remass capacity?
Some more nitpicking:
- it's mostly cosmetic, but it would be great if autopilot landed less "nochalantly" on planets - I mean approaching using gradually lowering leveled flight followed by level descent, rather than diving vertically, braking with retros, then flipping to leveled flight. A small thing, but would really improve ambience.
- spiky asteroids suck, BTW (Armageddon was a bad movie, m'kay?
) and they break both collision detection and landing pads.
- Can anything be done with time compression when close to planetary bodies? Locking higher levels out is a good idea, but it's a bit too sensitive, at least from player's PoV - if it's solely for engine's benefit, I guess nothing can be done, but maybe it could be tweaked to be less rigorous?
Finally:
- any known anarchies not far from Sol?
- are there any keys to navigate galactic map outside of plane of view? Having to rotate and slide in plane is very awkward.
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