Pods, ride shotgun

[Sundance]

Making an additional dialogue box for getting into pods seems like it'd make it more awkward, though, unless you made it so you could just click-drag yourself into a pod instead of having to go through that frustrating right click menu where the buttons never fucking work on the first try.

It's seems pretty simple, I don't think r-click needs to be put in. Just add a verb "assign seats" on the right window, in which people can select a seat to sit in. It's nothing to do with the properties of the pod, the fact that it's not a true 2x2 object, you could do this with a 1x1 object too. The assign seat verb will pop-up a window, and you have a choice of 4 seats (given the ship). Selecting a seat that's already taken will bring up a further prompt:
"This seat is already taken, request to change seats?" Selecting yes, will prompt the other player to change seats. If the other player selects no, then the seats will not be changed, and cannot be changed for 2 minutes or so, to stop someone sitting on the co-pilot seat and spamming the request.

So the seats.. Pilot, Co-pilot, Technician, and passenger.
Pilot controls the ship
Co-pilot can do

Or let the co pilot rotate the guns with the arrow keys (sorry for double post)

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Having a technician on your ship allows for certain things. It allows for when the pod is on fire, that the players within the pod can be extinguished (and thus not burn). It also allows for a booster, which was already suggested. He also repairs the ship, at a very slow rate (not useful if you are in a pod fight)
A passenger is just a plain ol' passenger, but he does have access to the ship's computer.

The great thing that is suggested that, a player can swap midflight. So a co-pilot can swap to be a technician if that is necessary. Another plus is that the pilot could eject himself from the ship, and the ship would just keep flying the same direction until someone swaps seats to become the pilot.

Addendum: "resisting" inside a pod should allow you to FORCE your way onto the pilot seat, and booting the pilot out into sapce. The pilot could resist back, but it's just a battle of the clicking at that point. This can be prevented with pod lock. GTA IN SPAAAACE.