A thought I had for hardcore, and not a"must-have" request, but I felt it might be interesting if in Hardcore, your ship's crew sort of turned into "bonus lives" for the player. Basically, if you die, the game checks if you have crew left on your ship and thus switch your character to one of the surviving (non-penguin) crewmate. It could be an interesting mechanic adding a layer of choice and important to recruiting a crew so you're less in danger of losing all progress when you die..... yet also keeping some amount of consequences to dying in-game because you still don't have endless amount of crew. It could still be possible to likely lose it all doing missions for NPCs(in the hope of recruiting more crew) by dying on your last crew-mate before being able to recruit more.
Do you mean the crew member replaces your character in death or that you start playing said crew member? Because the later would mean all your sexy customization is lost. >.>
It's true that you might lose some customizations. I'll admit that creating more of my characters with the "random" feature and only just a few minor tweaks I often forget about that aspect >.> But I'll admit I was liking the idea of your crew mates "picking up the torch" after your death and thus be able to continue playing that way.
