The problem is that space sims such as Freespace2, Alliance, I-war (arrgh that game was sooo good) Freelancer, etc...
have all turned out to be high cost investments with low return. The market group for this game type is to small to offer enough income to make a profit on. The ONLY way you are going to see any new high quality game of this type is either:
1. somebody crazy enough takes the finacial risk.
2. This game type is combined with another, such as the battlefield series. ...hmm now to think of it...isn't Dice doing a battlefield title that is based in the far future?

3. there are a few offerings out there from indepents that you can find on the net but they are not so good.

4. I suggest you get your hands on FreeSpace2 and download some of the awsome mods for it. or Get bridge commander and get some of the incredible mods for it...or both. Totally Games made the best space sims but those games are hard to find.

Sure there will be but it will be years before you see one. Lets see.... the only two major space sim games to come out in the last two years were Universal Combat a World Apart (a pretty good sandbox style space sim made by an independit) and somewhat new X3 or whatever its called (it was buggier than a house full of termites but supposedly alot is fixed now) both games require a pretty top of the line system either due to graphics or for the simulations. Oh and both those games use Starforce copy protection.

i was burned too bad with x2 to try x3. x2 was a buggy mess on release that had extremely poor combat compared with freespace and xwing (I was spoiled!!)

Lol...how sad. You have to be real careful with some developers these days. Mentioning piracy is like yelling bomb in an airplane, they freakout and get rid of you. They probably banned you because they felt what you said would start a long thread on piracy...which they feel the talk of would somehow create piracy of their game....even though they use that Lovely invasive copyprotection StarForce on it.

It's also possible they somehow thought you were saying you wouldn't have to pirate their game if they had put out a demo. Of course anyone would ban you for that. Cuz that's like saying, I wouldn't have had to steal the car if they just let me test drive it.

Speaking of lots of fighters and stuff.

I'm sorta icky that our small fighters aren't that small. What if when we build one 'fighter' we're actually buying 50 fighters. And what if, they can be docked into large capital carriers.

I sorta like that type of space fleets. It just feels weird that one of my capital ships is only fighting 4-5 small fighters.

Alternate game idea:

Ship Designer Idol (think American Idol ripoff).

You put your designs up before a panel of judges featuring:
- A Torian (to reperesent Paula Adbdul)
- A dude from that squirrel race (to represent Randy Jackson, think "wassup dawg" repeatedly in a high pitched squeaky voice).
- A C3P0-like Yor droid (as Simon, complete with british accent) verbally abusing you and your designs

The galactic senate would randomly vote off contestants.

If GC2 is the true heir to MOO2 what about making a true heir to Freespace 2 as well?