Disclaimer: The following is personal opinion and braindump and not representative of the views of the Discovery Mod Development Team.
So, capital ships. They go boom, and are big, and are expensive, am I right? And sometimes they're fielded sparingly by factions that can't afford to just keep cranking more and more replacement hulls out (an example being the BAF, whose fleet is in the middle of being owned by Gallia).
Some of you have played EVE. Others haven't. Now, before those who have (and likely those who haven't) jump down my throat for even mentioning EVE in a thread titled "Wacky Idea", please, keep reading. It's not that bad. For those who haven't played EVE, when your ship goes kaboom in the game (whether it be from PvE or PvP), that's it. That ship is gone. Done. The character survives, but the ship is no more. That's the total opposite end of the extreme for Discovery, where you can just hit respawn and go somewhere else.
Now, imagine for a second, that we had a balance between the two. One common suggestion is the implementation of a "death penalty" where a fraction of a ship's wealth is fined on death. In my opinion, that's a bit much. It could (and likely would) end up driving people away from Discovery. So I have a better idea.
In-RP, it takes time to build a ship. It takes a lot more time to build a battleship than it does a fighter. Fighters are practically churned out on a production line. Patching up a fighter that's been critically damaged could be as easy as throwing some new internal parts in and welding new armour in or as easy (yes, I said that twice) as transferring the equipment over to a replacement ship (let's just pretend ships come with insurance in the Discovery universe) and registering the replacement's serial number with the pilot's license.
Bigger ships, however, are a totally different deal. A freighter may only take a bit longer than a fighter to repair after being critically damaged (in case you haven't noticed, I dislike the term "destroyed" when we have a crazy respawn mechanic to account for). A transport or gunship's gonna take a lot more time -- there are more complex systems to build up and a lot more surface area. Cruisers and battleships are going to take insane amounts of time to repair after massive hull ruptures and reactor damage, and can't just be replaced like a fighter or bomber can. Factions like the Colonial Republic (sorry to pick on you guys -- I'd use VR as an example but then someone will scream bias or conspiracy or something) can't afford to shoot a new Thanatos out every time one gets blown up.
So here's my proposal: The larger a ship is, the harder it falls. The server already has mechanics for automatically-expiring tempbans. Fighters, on death, don't get tempbanned -- they just follow regular PvP death rules and and can go somewhere else. However, as ships grow in size through gunship and transport and cruiser and battlecruiser and battleship stages, they take a larger timeout on death. Let's say a battleship, once blown up, can't be used for 24 hours. Ballpark number. A cruiser might be usable again in 12. A transport, 12 for larger ones, 6 for smaller ones. A gunship, let's say 6.
This could be a really neat mechanic to implement. It would only contribute to roleplay. I know several factions already do this kind of things themselves -- something that inspired this wacky idea of mine.
I mean, really. If you blow up, say, a Hegemon, and then go over a few systems, and see it again, does that really help your immersion?
