Now folks, HTC hasn't determined a pricing scheme. The model they're following is to put out a beta that (A) irons out the bugs and, more importantly (B) builds up a community. Once they have an idea of the size of that community, they can start thinking up the best way to pay their bills.
As for "bomber gunners fly free": yes, that is dependent on the pricing scheme, and thus is a moot point. OTOH, an architecture such that "bomber gunners fly free" with respect to server resources might be worth looking at. How about, if the client can handle it, it is able to "pass through" the data it receives to a certain number of "sub-client" computers with on-board gunners?
Let me explain it this way:
For on-board gunners in certain sims on the market today, the server sends data to both the pilot and the gunner computers. So, the gunner computer receives the plane's position at the same time all the other planes do (1 Lag cycle). From this position, the gunner shoots at a target, and the other planes see the tracers (but by now they're so far behind it's better to turn them off) 2 full lag cycles beyond when the pilot was in that position.
The "traditional" method has the advantage of being simple. Gunner clients connect to the host the same way everybody else does. This is also its major disadvantage: gunner clients are going to occupy as much (or almost as muc) server load as pilot clients. Moreover, it necessarily increases lag.
The method I'd suggest is that only pilot clients connect to the server. These clients (assuming bandwidth) echo the information they receive along to the Gunner clients, who then send back their hit data to the pilot. In this way, gunners could come and go, would not necessarily have to have accounts, and would not tax the resources of the server. Even better, you could have seven geeks wired on a LAN operating a single bomber, without having all those weird human gunner hits.
On the other hand, it is a more complicated system, and hence more liable to failure. It also requires that the pilot have a pipe at least twice as large as that necessary to connect to the host.
