So I've had this crazy idea for a mission, and it involves intentionally wiping a player in space. I was wondering what an effective way to execute this would be. The easy answer would be to have battleships spawn on all sides of the player, but then there are various space abilities like evasive maneuvers, etc that would allow the player to escape.

So my question is, how can I get it so the player can't escape combat and dies for sure in space?

P.S. This isn't about griefing a player. This is about destroying the ship to advance the plot, as weird as that sounds. So don't take this to mean that I want advice griefing players with the Foundry. :p

Put groups of ships all around the player so they'd be trapped.

Invisible walls.

Great idea. I'd like to give at least the illusion that the player went down fighting though. Perhaps spawn enemies a few KM apart, then spawn an invisible wall outside of them?

That would work. You would need to set the respawn point to be inside the invisible cube and then make the cube "disappear" after they have completed that objective.

Surround them with enemies and put them inside a large box of invisible walls so they cannot escape the battle. Inside this area, place a smaller invisible box with the respawn point in it and a reach marker. However, reach markers seem to trigger off of entering its outer boundary, so if you spawn inside it may not activate. In that case, place an invisible box that covers the entire trapped area with an interact that says something like "Abandon Ship!" or "Signal Our Surrender".

Alternatively you can forget the large invisible wall box, and just have the objective read "Go down fighting!". You should be able to set that text whether you use a reach marker or an activate to signal defeat. That way they'll know they have to fight and are expected to lose. However, there's a chance they could run away and pick off the enemy ships one by one.

Battleships may not be the best choice to kill the player. If you put enough of them it will work (true of any ship type), but while battleships have a lot of hull, their up front damage output is not as high as a Frigate group (at least in my experience, testing my mission on Elite). More ships = more damage. It would probably be better to put a few battleships and cruisers for effect and then a ton of frigate groups. I would recommend using an overwhelming force. The less chance the player has to react, the less chance of them "screwing things up".