These would be great ideas for small maps, or furball oriented scenarios. On the other hand, if we see something like persistent online dynamic campaigns they would need some tweaking to fit in, especially if we want the people who like flying at full difficulty options to use them. For example, i doubt anyone would like using the ping function in a full real server, it's too much like playing an FPS or a top-down RTS game.
However, you're on to some solid foundations and with some "sim-oriented" fine-tuning i think they would be exciting and useful game mechanics to have.
For example, two things that could work for all game modes are the revised spawning ideas and reworked radio system.
If flying on a persistent campaign over a 1:1 sized map, how long before we have 2-3 hour bomber sorties in a future add-on for SoW? Few people have that much time, but if they could set-up a flight of AI bombers from the previous day and schedule it, they could possibly spawn into an already flying AI bomber before crossing into hostile airspace.
Say, an integrated navigation/mission planner that you can run while on the server, you draw up the waypoints, set altitudes and speeds and tell the planner that you want to be at this waypoing on 21:00. It then calculates the appropriate time for mission start, launches the AI bombers while you're at work and when you come home you can have some lunch and then spawn in an already flying bomber. Of course, other people could spawn into it first, so maybe an option to password protect the bombers or the raid as a whole would be useful. Or maybe your bomber could be shot down while it's still under AI control and you have nothing to spawn into, but such is war
Waves would be cool as well to have people cooperate more, but i also think that free-form spawning like it is now is good enough...if people want to join up they will regardless of spawn method. Similarly enough, if people are not team oriented fliers then they won't cooperate well, even if they are forced to spawn together.
The spawn-into-prescheduled-AI idea however is something i like a lot, mainly because it would give us the option of flying the most interesting parts of long distance sorties, without having to take a day off from work to do it. Imagine that you could jump into a B-17 that you "reserved" on the raid and fend off fighters over Holland, leave it to the AI crew, jump back out into the lobby and do a couple of rhubards with a typhoon across the channel, then spawn back into your B-17 as you reach the initial point to the target, and so on. We could be flying the most important and action filled parts of a 6-hour mission over a 1:1 scale map, without actually having to be flying for 6 hours...well, the option to do so would still be there of course
Before people start crying that it's unrealistic let me say that it's better than flying on scaled down maps, simply because of the imbalances scaled maps create on fuel consumption. Heavily scaled down maps=25% fuel loads that lead to unrealistic flight profiles and tactics. It's also not a battlefield 1942 style of respawn, where people capture areas on the map to spawn in, since in order for a player to take benefit ot it, he would have to actually schedule a sortie for his AI alter-ego well ahead of time.
It's like playing stratego on the map and saying "tomorrow we'll hit the V1 sites around Calais", coming back to the game 2 hours later and jumping into the mission right before the hectic part starts. Couple this with a variable range trigger to suit different tastes and difficulty levels and we would be golden.
For example, Calais is too close to warrant using it, if it's a mid-to-high difficulty server the admins would probably want the players to actually cross the channel themselves.
So, setting mission parameters like "spawn-into-AI unavailable for flights less than X miles long", "not permitted for players spawning in bases A,B,C" or "only permitted for players spawning in bases X,Y,Z" would do the trick quite nicely.
That's all in line with my other crazy ideas about collaborative editing of briefings and flight plan sharing in another thread, all of it is geared towards making it possible to fly a DCG style campaign in an online environment. People would plan missions, request help from others, have to do photo-recon work and share resources, back each other up and so on to win a campaign, the map would be huge and the campaign running 24/7. And since we can't coordinate 64-128 people in the use of time compression, this would be the next best alternative.
As for the radios, i would like to at some point have an integrated voice chat that would work like that, wartime radios. For example, if you take a look at the right side of a P-51's or P-47's cockpit, you'll see some red buttons. These were used to select one out of 4-5 pre-set frequencies, usually 3-4 voice channels and 1-2 navigation radios (like the ones we'll get in the 4.10 patch by TD), which were pre-set by the ground crews according to mission orders.
Pilots couldn't really tune into stuff manually, at least on single-seaters. Multi-crewed aircraft with a dedicated radioman could often even tune into AM radio stations, even small ones like the Bf-110. So, if flying a twin-engined bird or even bigger, you would be able to tune into the right frequencies to talk to your team-mates. If you were in a single seater, you'd select them on mission start and switch only between those presets during fight. Of course, using teamspeak on top of that would be entirely possible, but it would be a nice touch to have some structured comms between different groups, along with a common "team" frequency for all, not to mention the possibility of modelling radio range and reception (i think ArmA also does this, but for voices among characters walking in the field) in accordance with terrain. So, i could be crying like a baby for someone to get that Spitfire off my six, but nobody would be close enough to hear my radio transmissions or i would be breaking up as i was flying low across a valley/between hills. Lot's of interesting possibilities there.