We, the explorers, has been nagging about a dedicated exploration ship since day one. Why drag 400 tons of armour around in deep space when you never need it? Get a ship with module sizes optimised for jump range and straight line thruster speed. That's one.
Other things that could be interesting is a tech race between the different manufacturers. Why not a new ship type with new kinds of modules? That would also make it easier for Frontier to promote variation in the galaxy.
Often companies find that with expensive development projects like building new ship classes, it's better to stay in your own lane. Lakon develops freighters and a handful of multipurpose ships, Faulcon DeLacey and Zorgon Peterson focus on the entry level market with a handful of high end offerings to balance that out a bit, Saud Kruger is the new kid on the block with the liners. There's a bit of overlap but only as much as might make sense if a company thinks they need to expand their offerings slightly.
The design firms don't sell ships directly to customers, instead they license them for local manufacture to the galaxy's shipyards. This means that dividing the market into niches in this way makes sense. If there's a market in my stellar cluster for a midtier freighter, I call Lakon and see what they have for me, and license the production of a run of Type 6's. If someone floats a competing ship design that doesn't have the years of proven track record behind it, I'm likely to still call Lakon first unless that design was clearly superior, since I know what I'm getting when I license to manufacture type 6. Shipbuilding is too expensive an area of the market to be screwing around with.
If there's one thing I think there ought to be in this game, it's probably a few Zorgon-Peterson offerings roughly between the Adder/Hauler and the Keelback. However, Faucon DeLacey has that market locked down with the Cobras, so I can see ZP not bothering as long as their entry level ships are still selling.
Also I am eventually hoping for Alliance faction ships. My preferred concept would be a series of rejiggered Lakon freighter designs with a lot of small hardpoints and a couple really big ones on the dosral and ventral ridges, all optimized for use with turrets so that they fly like mini capitals and there's no angle of approach where at least one turret isn't painting you.
Turret based combat with power and shields big enough to make turret based combat effective in a big ship to ship fight. Freighters repurposed for combat, but still freighters by feel, just uparmored, upengined and upgunned. Feels like the way the Alliance would fight.
o7 Bit of fun Cmdr.))
