Since Battlescape is essentially War Thunder in Space I suggest you copy their model when it comes to gameplay. In War Thunder you basically shoot each other over and over again. What makes it interesting is the many places, missions, craft and rewards.
If Battlescape could have different enough locations and missions. It would be a bit more interesting to play over and over again. Also a decent reward system would help as well. There are so many battles from WW2, Star Wars and Star Trek that could be adapted.
I suggest you try playing War Thunder and see what makes it fun to come back to do the same thing over and over.
Before I start, just a remark that we’ve played War Thunder, Dreadnought, Planetside, and pretty much all recent or old space games already.
Of course the current version of the game is much more barebones, but almost everything you mentionned is planned in a way or another ( persistent progression, missions, rewards / unlockables etc… ).
One big difference however is the amount of crafts. We have a limited budget so we’re not free to expand on the number of ships that easily. WT has a lot of them ( I don’t know the exact number, a hundred+ ? ). We’re not going to get anywhere close, the game currently has 6 playable ships with a seventh coming out in a few months. We’ll look into expanding ships after the release, but it’ll be dependent on the budget and popularity of the game.
In terms of locations, we have plans for more Battlescapes ( aka. planets in the solar system ), which is going to impact the match progression. That is going to be implemented soon-ish ( by fall probably ). There are also plans to expand on the number of planets, add ground details, new asteroid fields etc… but that will come later.
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You wouldn’t be the first to compare, and War Thunder is definitely a decent benchmark for combat sims.
Are you aware of the development roadmap linked here?
You might find that some of the things you wish for are indeed planned. 
Wait… a seventh?
*Oh right, hauler, yes?
When you said seventh, I thought about Deathstar sized ship… but yeah I almost forget about hauler.
I’d like to add to this post: When you’re a new player the game currently feels daunting. There’s a battle going on but it’s hard to really know how you can impact it apart from just jumping into combat and hoping you’re making a difference. (And with the starter ship, it feels like you don’t, really)
Smaller ‘intro’ missions would really help new players to orient themselves. Maybe an attack on a hauler. Or isolated smaller outposts that are away from the main battles. These wouldn’t massively impact the battles but impact the players themselves who want to have quick gratification and a sense of progression.
Doing this with some AI buddies who you can group up with would make the game feel a little less like it’s empty when not many players are around. There is a dead simple formation flight button in Freelancer, something like this could make things easier in the beginning. To add to this, Freelancer had a lot of clickable commands on screen. You didn’t have to memorize the keyboard control scheme, which is daunting at first. If you don’t know the button combination for fast travel, you just click on it and off you go. Making this a choice in the cockpit displays or on screen for new players might make things a lot easier for them.
(Sure there’s training, but make a Steam achievement when it’s completed and get data on how many people actually finish it.)
There could be more gamification to battles that make it more evident who is winning and who is losing and what is needed to turn the tide of battle around. The universe map on mission select could be a lot, a looot more simplified and abstract, for example. Right now it being connected to the star map is a detriment to the information you can see on the map itself. The ‘instant action’ button, whilst a good addition, feels like a band aid solution. This is because if the mission select screen itself were intuitive, you’d know what to do immediately. Not adhering to actual distances could help bring more structure into the information on mission select, because it wouldn’t be such a zoom-fest.
A simple structure to the battles could be that you first have to attack outposts that are like factories that provide energy to a shield for the ‘final outpost’ that needs to be attacked. That way you’d immediately know A -> B -> C -> Win. Sure it throws realism out of the window a bit, but if we’d be concerned with realism humans wouldn’t (couldn’t) be flying these space ships in the first place.
I’ve had a lot of fun in Battlescape when I took my time to learn it and move up the progression ladder. But before that was a time where I didn’t ‘get’ the start of the game and felt overwhelmed. I assume many more casual players have put down the game or even refunded at that point.
This game has amazing tech and potential! But I feel that it could be a lot ‘easier’ at first, simply meaning that it eases players into the more advanced aspects of the game that come later. If more people moved up the progression ladder and didn’t get stuck at start, they’d be more likely to stick around, too.
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Hi, philipp1241
I generally agree and have had similar initial experience with IB.
Check out this thread " 0.8.X.X Feedback Thread".
Flavien has shed some light on the future changes, which may address some of your concerns.