To limit access to a ship, make it available at the mission station allowing only VERY friendly players to purchase it. Have that station aligned to your new faction (one completely neutral to everything in the game). When the character passes the mission(s), their reputation will go up. Basically, no one else can buy the special ship until their reputation is good enough, and the only way to increase it is through the mission.

Hope this helps.

BTW, this may or may not directly apply to things, but I have figured out how to make Solar Defenses, etc... which can add a great deal to the interest/difficulty of a Quest-type mission.

Among other things... if one uses some imagination and some custom Loadouts, one can make a Mission where you have to kill a Solar, which drops an object that tells the player where to go next, and also might be sellable for some ridiculous sum, which can then be used to bribe the location into being friendly and assigning the next leg of the quest, etc., etc., culminating in some extra-nifty uber-gear. For that matter, each leg of the quest could give players all of the "parts" they need to assemble the Ultimate Ship

Y'know, if that was done very, very nicely... I would almost not think unkindly about giving a player uber-gear that way, so long as there were uber-beasties that needed to be blown to bitz with it...

I have a reward system in my mod. I have a special clan called -!NOMAD!- setup that fly specially modified nomad fighters that are only available on Nomad bases (I have also put these in) so you have to be friendly with nomads to get the ship. Obviously becoming friendly with nomads is not possible in normal play so i edit players using IONCROSS to give them the ability to buy the ship. Only players that i trust btw.

Second I have made the prisoner commodity available on the nomad base for 10k. The cargo hold in the nomad fighter only holds 1 commodity and no more. Cargo looting is enabled on the nomad fighter, when they die they drop the prisoner. The player that killed the nomad can then tractor in the prisoner as a reward for killing the nomad, they are tough to kill though. The Prisoner commodity is worth 2 million on all other bases.

I have also created a system which cannot be accessed unless kicked there by admin. The system is empty except for one base, this bases sells clan ships. All my official clans get a unique ship only available to their clan. This is how i control who can get it.

Try something along these lines.

Buck Rogers
Server Admin
Colours Elite UK
www.colourselite.co.uk

Cheers for your ideas guys. The problem that i find, is that i was play testing my mod for 4 days and ended up wih the ultimate ship and a spare 4.5 mill credits which i had no use for.
Admittedly, i do know the mod inside out, but i've already increased the cost of things massively, 768k for a class 10 shield, 250k for nomad blasters.. ships costing 1.2 mill...
And i still got to the point of, "so what else do i do?"
I've done some work on adding courier commodities throughout the, already massive, mod. And, added long range destroy missions with custom or special equipment assigned to a target.
Its got various fluff, but its mostly, "The Imperium have a base that we want destroyed. We are looking for a freelance solution to this matter, you efforts will be rewarded". Then you have to go between 2-6 systems undercover avoiding enemy patrols in hostile and well defended systems. You destroy the target, tractor in the "mission complete" commodity (which can only be sold at base of operation) and gather any looted equipment.
I've done the first 21 bases and i'll most likely add others to people like the corsairs or the outcasts. The bases themselves are nondockable versions of the base solars armed with cruiser weapons.

Anyway, back to topic.... rewards..
Shipwise, there are few ships that could really be a reward. Sure they can have good armour and weapon abilities. But, when it come down to it the sort of ship would need to be something along the lines of the Hydra B or Andromeda. A ship with very good offensive and a large cargo hold for looting in the spoils.
I could make a unique faction (or use an unused one) and give the shipdealer say fc_ln_grp then at the end of the quest allow the player to dock somewhere and bribe someone to get the repfix. But, then once a few players have got to the end of the quest, they could just tell the others where to go at the end.
I'm not going to be allowing player controlled capitals or transports as it will make the game too easy.
I'm clearly going to have to give this some thought..

You could always make a base where two bribes are available :

-One gets you allied with a faction that is good with everyone, thus making you 100% neutral if not friendly.

-One gets you allied with a faction that is bad with everyone, thus making you 100% ennemy.

Then you call these the Blue Pill and the Red Pill