I mean stat-wise - cosmetically it's obvious, Malabar's hull is dotted with all those little windows, but the way ship stats currently work it's hard to make this cosmetic distinction translate into gameplay in any meaningful manner - no matter what changes are made to distinguish those ships, at the end of the day you could still fit more passengers into supposedly transport one and still use the passenger one to haul almost as much cargo (does it fit behind all these windows?).
Therefore I propose that all ships have some built-in passenger capacity corresponding with their looks - if a ships hull has a lot of windows and it looks like it could take a lot of people, it can take a lot of people.
Actually, why not drop the distinction between different kinds of people in favour of general "people capacity"? - a ship could have certain shared habitability after the pilot/commander that could be occupied by extra crew and leftover space could be used to ferry passengers, so a passenger hull could be used as passenger ship, or whatever operations would require a large number of crew - after there is enough different functionality to actually benefit from large number of crewmembers - (or something in between).
Now, the only remaining question would be what to do with extra passenger cabins?
I see following options:
- drop them - it's not the first time Frontier carryovers would fail to fit into Pioneer
- drop 'passenger' from the name (shared habitability) and make them work as usual, but make them disadvantageous compared to integral cabins so a dedicated passenger/large crew ship would perform better (mass, capacity) than a converted one
- drop 'passenger' from the name (see above) and make them work as usual but make them distinct "economy class" cabins (no windows, for example), separate passengers into a better paying category that demands some luxury and low paying (or sometimes high pay - high risk) category that simply needs to get from A to B. Crew could default to lower standard cabins, so that it wouldn't block the premium ones.
- Combination of 2&3.