It's always seemed a little odd to me that our vast, interplanetary empires have a *single* ship as their entire military. (Although it's lately been becoming more of a fleet, which makes more sense).

In that spirit, I suggest that there be a way to build a couple mini-ships that can act as planet guards. Here's how they'd work, keeping in mind that I'm aiming for balance more than realism:

You spend a decent chunk of resources and you get a guard ship with stats equal to 1/4 to the *current* unbuffed stats on your main ship. You can then use it on a planet - it takes up no space, but uses the 'Guard planet' slot. If it's guarding, you can't use your main ship to guard as well. If you alert the planet, other people can guard normally.

It works like a normal guard, granting its stats to the defenses and cloak. It *cannot* be warped away. However, it can be targeted normally, and if disabled will be completely destroyed.

You can deploy/withdraw them whenever you like, and move them around freely.

However, you can only own *three* of them at any given time. This prevents you from spamming them if your planet is under attack. You can have the guards active or just sitting idle, but you can never have more than three. Building them should have a small timer associated so you can't instantly replace them.

They'd have a few useful advantages:
They would add cloak to make a couple worlds harder to find.
They would provide some defense to planets even if your main ship has been disabled.
You could prioritize your planet defenses a bit more.
They'd scale with your strength. Although their stats are locked in when you build one, you can always build another that is based on your current ship stats. You could also customize them a bit - for example, if you were an SSB and loaded every defensive module you had, you could make a guard that focused most on defense. If this is too much of a coding hassle, simply matching 1/4 of your current stats is still nicely scaling.

I do like this idea. Perhaps you could build them from a CT Lab print and they start out as a lvl 1 Guard. Then level them similar to allies, but max at lvl 10 (where it reaches 25% of your stats.)

And have it use Ship Bots in the recipe!!!!!!!

I did suggest, many moons ago, having the ability to capture NPCs after defeating them and deploying those as guards.

i can't see anything wrong with the idea beyond potential for abuse/problems if more than one such guard ship. not saying i see huge potential for problems, but i suspect it would be more feasible in Dan's mind if its just one.

I don't think they should have cloak. As is I can sit on a planet with no cloak on it and it will be invisible.

Just simple att/def is fine, but later we can expand them to have different properties, or be used as blockades on enemy planets.

+1, and agree with wolfy about cloak.

Fair enough re: cloak, and yes, you could only have one guarding a planet at a time.

Having them be a Lab recipe could work nicely.

I like the idea - just to clarify, you could still use your own ship to guard or use one of the three guards?

Right, you couldn't use both on the same planet, but you could guard one planet with your main ship and have three others with the guards on them.