This sounds interesting I hope there are twice the available Mercenaries in the game, I also hope there is a way to select what mercenaries will be in the game.  One additional thought is to have each level mercenary only available at different Bazaar's for instance one Bazaar maybe only has the first tier, another may have the third, ect...  Last suggestion add on a fourth tier for late game and, need to be able to upgrade Mercenaries.  Maybe not like you upgrade ships, maybe have to visit the bazaar again and he will offer and upgrade for x durantium + thulium and $$ and this ship gets x.  Allow one use ships to be upgraded to be multi use ships as long as they are upgraded prior to use, although as a player you take the risk of loosing that ship in battle if your sitting on it as that multi use ship may cost too much right now to upgrade it.  One could even have to fly the mercenary ship to the upgrade bazaar to even get that option...

This would put a nice additional feature on the mercenaries.

Crusade was meant to be a stand-alone after all, so hard to say.

Both statements are correct.  It was originally intended to be a stand-alone, but in another thread Brad said they had changed their minds and were now going to offer it as DLC.

Hoping a Mercenary ship that boosts admin happens. Along with "citizens" that do the same

Luceo Non Uro

Yeah. Something like that... and I replaced every one of them. 

But does Gauntlet have the ship that converts a single Class zero to an awesome class 16? 

Will crusade come with mercenaries, or does that require the mercenaries expansion, or does crusades has a different set of mercenaries altogether.

Hopefully crusades will fix that long running bug where you don't get weapon animations with custom ships in the battle viewer.

Then I will be able to use Gauntlets creations in all there glory.

Just so you know, that only applies the AI designed ships. Custom ships you design have weapon effects as normal.