Fly as a capital ship

There is a trick that FREDders can do while FREDding a missiion that can allow them to pilot ships that they normally can't. This includes freighters, cruisers, capital ships, and even the Colossus.

For starters, suppose that you have 2 ships in a mission. Alpha 1 is in a Loki, while Beta 1 happens to be an Orion. Save the game, start FreeSpace 2, go to the mission simulator, and select the mission. When you're there, go to ship selection and there will be 2 icons, Alpha 1 (you) is a Loki, and Beta 1 is an Orion. Switch those 2 ships and start the mission. Congratulations, you're flying an Orion now.

The other way is to table hack to make them drivable.

Although you are tricking the game to fly as a capital ship while you should be flying as a fighter, the game will treat you as a capital ship in all respects. This means that you will be targetted by anti-capital ship beams, bombers will launch cyclops at you, and wings protecting you will make normal cruiser guarding patrol patterns.

Issues

1. If you're using FSO and send beam cannons unlocked by default in the Mission SPEC, all beam cannons will fire normally, except for yours. To make your beam cannons fire normally, you have to set a beam-free-all SEXP yourself.

2. Warping out while flying a capital ship is quite different from NPC capital ships warping out. Instead of shooting out forward at incredible speeds, you will be going at a slow pace, and the subspace vortex will take a minute to show up, as will take another minute for you to enter it. Mission designers should keep this in mind when requiring the player to flee a supernova in a capital ship.

Is this worth it?

The answer is no. While it may seem cool to control a massive ship, keep in mind that you will be going slow, turning is horrible, and you have no primary gun mounts. Although you have dozens of turrets to do the work for you, having AI-controlled turrets doing all the shooting for you can really get you bored very fast.

Additionally, as your subsystems are damaged, the damage list will grow until it obscures most of the screen.

Another issue is that you can accidentally kill one of your own fighter pilots assigned to protect you. It is not unreasonable to think that a couple of our own flak guns will edventually kill a friendly starfighter attacking an enemy fighter. Command and other pilots will start throwing threats at you for attacking them. Worse, you can't normally turn those turrets off! Edventually, you get labelled as a backstabber and will get attacked by everyone else. Though your own crew will still be loyal to you, you will end up being mauled by other cruiser's beam weapons.