Karnot

Do you think this would increase the Potential Enjoyment Factor of a game?

By itself ? Not really. Depends on the rest of the game.

There have been many games with similar mechanics.
There was a recent roguelike i believe, seven...something, where you play as a member of a family, and if you die you switch over to the next member.
There was, of course, Omikron, where if you died, you took control of the first person to touch your corpse.
There is Demise, where you could get yourself killed or potentially obliterated, and if you wanted your characters back - you had to create new characters and go pick up the corpses to resurrect in town, or grind until they learned some high level magic.
There was that recent console game, where if you died - you could tell someone a code, which they entered on their end, and then go on to save your characters.

He travels to the site of Fred's death and causes Fred to be animated as a Zombie. The player can now resume the game with Fred...as a Zombie.

I am quite sure there have been more than one roguelike with characters than could go on after death as undead. Cant think of the names at the moment.

My desired games are somewhere between the 'Final Fantasy' and 'KOTOR'.

Its a bit funny, since FF and KOTOR have exactly the same system, time-wise. You act, then you get a delay during which you cannot act, then you can act again. Same as in almost every D&D game on PC. I call it "round-based", because its fairly specific, and is neither turn-based, nor real-time.

Do you think there's any advantage using turn based over real time?

Yes. Outside of playing with unicums who can do a million of things in 5 seconds (yeah, right), turn-based system does usually offer more choice, detail, and complexity.

One other major reason - its not simultaneous. For example, if you have many units in different parts of the map - its impossible to be everywhere, notice everything, and control everyone at the same time. Some games, for example SRW, are designed primarily as spectacles. For such games its unforgivable if something happens away from your attention and you missed it. Other games you might want to attack the enemy from multiple sides, and have to hop between your units like a mad rabbit. Some games offer split-screen functionality or tracking windows, but its not quite the perfect solution. In turn-based you are always focused on the action, since everything is sequencial, not parallel.

weight

If we're talking space - its not weight anymore, its mass. And in space, mass is a rather pointless thing to worry about on a spaceship, realistically speaking.

I feel all slot based spaceship design systems I encountered were broken and simply lame.

That is because they are almost never properly implemented. There are two things that must be done :
1) Have physical position be actual position. Meaning, putting armour plating on the front will protect you from the front. Putting things in front of other things will determine their destruction order.
and 2) Have weapons have angle arcs according to their actual position.

As far as i know no game ever did both, only one or the other. Most do none. I think Sword of the Stars 2 have both, but i cant say not having actually played it.

Usually when devs dont want player to abuse save/load they enforce ironman mode, or entice the player with some positive bonuses for not saving. As a player i prefer getting bonuses for not saving, rather than receiving penalties for saving. But !

What if you want to make a game, any game whatsoever, where combat is involved, and you really want for player to lose some battles. Not that the battles are scripted for player to lose, any given battle is winnable, but rather that winning or losing a battle will direct the story in different directions. Say, if you win you continue on your quest towards some goal, but if you lose you fall into servitude to someone, things like that. You want the player to experience the feel and consequences of losing, but more than that, you want players to see other sides of the storyline. If everyone will just reload and bruteforce through the battle - that will never happen !

How would you suggest to the player that losing might have its merits, storywise ?