Airship as Guild Housing and Docking at Floating Cities!

[DemonForest]

I like the idea, but not as much as I like having your FC mates living in a neighborhood with you on beach-side residences.

In terms of this actually happening, I don't see someone actually flying the ship but rather an NPC that is selected (similar to selecting a companion) and the ship being instanced.
From this, I have some ideas (sorry if its been stated. I didn't read through the whole thread)

1) If it is instanced, there can be an additional option in the menu called called "Call Airship". Once your Free Company has bought and built an airship, players can call it to them (with maybe a 5-10 minute wait) and then they are then transported to the ship flying above.
2) This can make the airship become a central hub for meeting prior to raids and such (even take away some of the congestion in Ul'dah)
3) The airship can drop players off at a certain camp without having to have all of the players in the same party. This would make it possible for traveling as a Free Company rather than traveling as a party.

The reason I don't see the airship being pilotable is because I can't imagine how the devs could possibly make a bunch of airships flying around in the sky work, let alone make flying work while dividing the map into smaller zones.

Instanced would be the easiest way to code/impliment this design.

Allods Online

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVx6M1Jdgm0

Ship serves as sort of Guild House, as you have to keep loot in it during Astral visit. Opposing Guilds can fight you, board you and take your loot. IMO we could use more refine on this and it could works.

This is actually a really cool idea/battle concept. That would work for the new Grand Company Siege PvP content that they are already developing.

Overall this is one of the most brilliant suggestions I've seen put forth. SE could use this as a huge time/gil sink and it would help the economy from just running away.
On the flip side this would be a nightmare to code. And outside of the instanced idea this would be an extremely large server load. SE would have to invest in almost EVE level of server mainframes to tolerate the load of that many ships moving across the world. Not to mention that Ezora is not that large of a world/continent. Its big, but not that many hours to cross by Chocobo.
At earliest this would have to be an expansion. Unless Yoshi has this up his sleeve as a secret for 2.0 anyway.
However he has mentioned the possibility of eventually having flying chocobos. That could be peoples way of getting on/off Airships when they are in range. That would be a blast.

I love all of the ideas put forth here and I really hope SE takes a good long look at this idea. It has merit and deserves to be mapped out and found if it is at all affordable to implement. Hopefully they are building the world in such a away to leave it open for the possibilities of something along this line in the future. Who knows, XI has lasted 10 years now, who knows where XVI will be in 10.