See, this is why I recently suggested FDev should try and come up with a reason for us to station ships at multiple locations throughout the bubble.
Perhaps they could make it so that becoming allied to a faction gives you some kind of a "trade licence" to fly that ship in their jurisdiction or something?
Whatever.
Point is, we all like to fly different ships and it'd be nice if there was something to encourage us to have multiple ships filling similar roles in different places.
If you wanted to, you could buy half a dozen Pythons, half a dozen vultures and half a dozen Anacondas and create several identical "fleets" but, for the rest of us, it'd give us something to do with most of the ships we already own.
Currently my Python is parked-up in LHS, as part of my "Alliance Fleet", while my Clipper is doing a similar job out in Merope.
Generally I do fly lots of different ships, I own 16 and the only duplicates are a pair of Asps and a pair of Pythons. One of the Pythons is permanently built as a miner and one of the Asps is permanently built as an explorer with everything engineered; the other Python is my general
'take off and see where I end up' mission runner, whilst the other Asp was my smuggler back in the days when fail-on-scan smuggling was a thing, so there's no overlap in roles at all between even the duplicated ships.
It's a specific problem that I have with the Clipper, in that for me to use it I basically have to want a ship that's fast as hell (mine does 575) but can't dock at outposts and has a class 7 slot that isn't really a bonus for anything that I'd want to do in it. If they ever decide to introduce a slot-splitter so I could effectively have two class 6 slots instead of the class 7 I could find much more use for it, in fact I'd almost certainly use it for long range bulk passenger transport missions, but as things stand with no class 7 cabins we're back to the Python being far more useful for that because it can load more people, doubly so when it can also dock at outposts.
The clipper's real value is that it's a large ship that you can buy for relatively few credits and can get out of almost any danger whilst trading due to it's insane speed. Trouble is, in the game as it is today by the time you've got the rank to unlock it you will also have enough credits that the fact it's cheap won't really be a big factor.
I agree that we need
something to make some of the ugly duckling ships more viable.
