First off, why was the skylark, presumably a military capital ship considering the tremendous number of "marines" and apparent lack of civilians on board, orbiting an unknown planet out of whatever passes for long-range communication with wherever the spiral knights come from/any friendly advanced civilization?
Let us assume that, in fleeing the imminent destruction/annex of the spiral knights homeworld, the ship performed some sort of emergency warp jump. This could also explain the crash, as the skylark would have been unprepared for any physical anomalies cradle might have (mysteriously heightened gravity, ambient core energy, or even some massive gremlin-constructed device).
My suggestion is that maybe one or two levels are made that can be unlocked only with plenty of ce and multiple tokens from each boss in which a party of knights tries and fails to open the core (maybe finding alpha squad/the gremlin king along the way), but manages to extract maybe a sixteenth-ton of tearium, enough to power a single fighter jet for each knight. From here, individual knights can warp back to their now creep-infested homeworld in the hopes of liberating it from its conquerors with new cradle-inspired weapons.
In terms of gameplay, the skylark had hundreds of tons of tearium on it, right? And there is no indication that the Skylark was one-of-a-kind. So, there must be plenty of tearium, or at least plenty of supply depots full of tearium, on the Spiral Knights homeworld. As such, players might be inclined to craft new weapons and armor capable of using this powerful material. They could find little pockets of tearium that would give them a few stored charges that could be used to supercharge the next hit with a sword/gun/bomb or maybe activate an ability of a piece of armor they're wearing (eg cloak, temporary invincibility, SMALL heal, speed boost, teleport, etc). Hopefully, this would end up looking something like: a 1-star homeworld galvanic blade is similar to a 4-star cradle boltbrand, but you can expend a tearium charge to make its next attack deal 5x damage and give strong shock OR a 1-star homeworld celestial armor is similiar to 4-star cradle seraphic mail, but you can expend a tearium charge to cleanse fire and poison and reflect all shadow damage back at its source for 5-10 seconds. Homeworld equipment would only go to 3-star and be unusable on cradle due to its high tearium requirements.
Hm.
I saw this thread and was all ready to come over and do an epic-rage beatdown 'STFU AND GTFO NOOB U NO KNO WAT U ON ABOUT' post, considering the people who usually suggest this, but I am pleasantly surprised to see you actually tried to think about this.
Anyway, I'll answer a few questions, and perhaps you'll see why after this the answer, from me at least, will still be a no.
Iirc, the Skylark and it's inhabitants were on a recon mission of sorts, scanning and collecting data on several planets for some reason. You may assume in the search for a suitable new Home-World if you want.
In which case the Science team would lead the way, whereas the Soldiers, there will always be some to guard the 'nerds' just sat around idly in case they were ever attacked by Space Pirates or locals.
Now, as story goes, the Spiral Knights were physically drawn to Cradle apparently, while scanning the surface. assume it is in the hope the Core can recruit the Knights to help it, and use them to defeat the Swarm that grows withing the darkness. In which case an 'offworld' scenario wouldn't be all that appealing unless o a specific duty-trip Cradle-related.
Equipment-wise, I doubt many people would be overly thrilled about using a slagload of CE and cr to gain access to new gear that would take another slagload of stuff to craft, not to mention you can pretty much only use it in one place.
Furthermore, such an endeavor would take a MASSIVE amount of programming, testing, and most crucially: time to make, in which you'd probably have quit the game and moved on with your life by the time they made this.
Not to mention that should this 'liberation' succeed, the Knights could just arrange a mass-transport fleet to pick up all of Cradle's stranded knights and the whole 'Save Cradle, save the universe' scenario would be completely screwed.
Long story short: The Spiral Knights have an unofficial mission to continue with on the world of Cradle, and despite their efforts to leave, they are likely to not get that chance until they comply, or are subtly manipulated into complying with the 'Greater power's needs.
Any questions?