Yes, when there's no CRU, the spawns should always be from orbit... The current state where people just appear is as immersion-breaking as fedo farm with pink elephants.

I can happily support those two changes to the current system and Baal if your vision were in place I think that would indeed add nuance to Skirmish that would be a breath of fresh air.

Having said that I do feel the need to post a couple of counter points to other ideas raised in this thread, if any of the ideas I'm responding to are now "outdated" in favor of the above quoted suggestions feel free to ignore my responses on those counts and I'll proceed in this thread under the assumption that they're ideas which we've moved beyond during the course of discussion and are no longer on the table.

More CRUs - This in itself is a fine idea, but is in no way a possible substitue for the current NC spawn points. Our standard CRUs can be popped by HAV fire (or even upgraded LAV/Forge fire) much more rapidly that seems to have been acknowledged. I've been in matches as recently as tonight where a single Proto Swarm user took out all the CRUs and Depots on the map from behind his own teams lines of defense and still had time/ammo to take out several LAVs as well. If one guy with swarms can do that even doubling or tripling the total CRUs pre map won't allow them to survive a single squad who's decided to take them out. This leads to far less tactical game play as one squad (or less) can unilaterally redefine the battlefield and increase the frequency of spawn camps. Red lines are boaring and are fed by having few/bottlenecked spawing locations, we need less of it not more.

Sky Spawn - Another case of an idea that is fine and even good as an addition to the game but as a substitution becomes terrible. Talk about removing tactical game play make every spawn both more obvious to opposing forces and more vulnerable to being DOA. Again spawn camping reduces fun and should be minimized not supported by map mechanics, which forcing mercs into a predictable, obvious and exposed spawning method most certainly does.

Uplinks - These are heavily underused, and granted the "hidden in the terrain" bug is a problem but they honestly don't need a buff or more of a reason for use. In fact making them more tactically useful pushes the limits of being broken.
I can already get 4 uplinks out during the opening of a match on my own having set up a spawn network on/near ever NC. With a squad of 4 that's 16 links and that's while only having level 1 in the uplinks skill. When I had proto uplinks before the wipe I could nearly hit that squad mark by myself and I'm usually able to earn several hundred WPs off the uplinks alone (that becomes around a thousand in an ambush oms which the total removal of static/indestructible spawns would push skirmish towards). Beyond that having them be a "mainstay" of general spawning as opposed to tactical spawning runs into the same sorts of problems that CRUs face as outlined above, except that you don't even need AV to take them out.

Hacking - Solo Don't undersell the value of character skills. During closed beta I ran a solo infiltrator hack fit with full skill support. I used only the SMG as a weapon and was still able to 'run the table' on many pub matches. I did not need to kill opposing forces, and I rarely ever got popped by either hidden forces or spawners, such a role is not only viable but highly effective (in pubs anyway, Corp/FW is another beast).
Squad - The squad I run with tends to have one guy start the hack and to others jump on at 50%. This not only means max WP gains from it but also that we're rarely pulled off the hack by incoming hostile squads, much less piecemeal spawn ins.

Summation - I agree with much of the principle of this thread but any alterations must be done very carefully with an eye to maintaining many dynamic spawn locations that are not purely player dependent as in the present game it is already far to easy to trap and spawn camp a team removing all tactical play from the game. I highly support the quoted text above but would add current CRUs should at least stay at present levels (tho more would be fine) even with those changes.

Cheers,
Cross

Reposting basically what I've said in my Sky SpawningGäó thread.

CRU spawns, since you're spawning in a Clone Reanimation unit, should work as they do now. Drop Uplinks, as a variant of wormhole tech, should work as they do now. MCC spawns involve a clone from the MCC being activated.

Ambush "random" spawns, and Skirmish objective spawns, and the Skirmish "default" spawn that's currently on the ground should all be changed to use an air-drop.

In addition to this spawn mechanic, the falling mechanics in the game need adjusting.

While a player is in free-fall - not just a normal fall from jumping, but when you've fallen far enough to take the free-fall position and trigger the prompt for your Inertia Dampener - you should have (limited) ability to adjust the direction of your fall. On activating your Inertia Dampener, you fall faster, but you light up and you lose the ability to control your descent. This makes you a harder target, but makes you more visible.

This will encourage players - while not under fire - to hold off on triggering their Inertia Dampener until the last second to avoid their blue glow giving them away. It will also encourage players who have been spotted and are actively being fired on to use the Dampener to speed up their descent and evade the incoming fire.

With Ambush spawns - adjusted as many people have requested so that enemy presence is more heavily weighted than friendlies - this would mean you're usually dropping into a less dangerous part of the map, and you have the ability to fine-tune your landing position based on the location of nearby enemies, who you'll see as you're falling. With Skirmish, you're dropping into an area your team already controls, so you SHOULD have someone handy to keep enemies off you, OR you should have reinforcements landing around the same time as you.

In my own personal vision, each objective would have an accompanying "built in" CRU that was NEAR the objective, but not directly on top of it. Some maps currently have this already for some objectives. Yes, it seems like a minor change, but the strategic implications would add quite a bit to the game, making the choice of "do we hack the objective or the CRU first" (and defenders would have to make similar choices) much more important.