I was thinking about the possibility of multiplayer for Endless Sky. Not in the standard sense of multiplayer, with servers and nowadays mandatory internet connection even for a "LAN" game: I was thinking more in the line of true "LAN", like in the old days when we took our computers to one spot, WiFi'ed, LAN'ed or LapLinked into the game host and Quake'd or Starcrafted or Totally Annihilated the crap out of each other.

I am not a programmer and I do not know the validity of my idea, but anyway:

This LAN works a bit different: 2+ players on Endless Sky link as described, and then one can "advertise" services in-game or hire other players. I guess you can call them "Player NPC's". Hire them for escort duty, or trade with them in the Trading- or Outfitter screens (or maybe add a menu option for it). Even allow for players playing like pirates, to be added to the job board as pirates in the system to be hunted. Rep will play a big role here. Boarding the flagship gets the player dropped down at the next planet with a shipyard, with a bank loan of 1.5M credits (not all shipyards have cheap shuttles and barges and sparrows to start with).

Undiscovered areas stay undiscovered. Just because I go to the next town with someone, doesn't mean he was were I've been before we met.

I say to make it a LAN-style, because adding internet will likely include server rent, which will in time make it necessary to charge a maintenance fee. And I am very sure, what made Endless Sky attractive to many players, is the no-fee, no in-game sales model as it is.

Just a thought.