So, I was thinking, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. But something I would like to see in a future update. Ship building. As in from top to bottom. The ability to design and build our own 100% custom ships. It could even tie into setting up legitimate businesses in game, much like the new Fleet Carriers giving the ability to control market and services. A Fleet Carrier that came with a manufacturing wing so you could design and build ships, ships that could end up in demand, but also be limited in production, you could fly to different systems and sell them, much like the big name car manufacturers do now. Just a thought. What are the chances of anything like any of this? It would also give us the chance to be far more immersed in the politics and economics of the game. Actually take part in it. That sort of thing.
General Devs, if you take requests for future content... IDEA TIME! Something for the future to look forward to?
- Thread starter jlott069
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I would not want to see ships being built from scratch. Though I'm usually in the "fun over realism" camp, I feel like this would go way too far against the spirit of elite.
Designing a spaceship isn't like lego, it takes years of r&d, and I feel like the ships we have currently reflect that well.
This sort of feature would fit in better in No Man's Sky or something.
Being able to heavily modify our ships, and have that represented visually, however, would be pretty damn cool.
Also, do you really want to see all those space dongs flying around?
Designing a spaceship isn't like lego, it takes years of r&d, and I feel like the ships we have currently reflect that well.
This sort of feature would fit in better in No Man's Sky or something.
Being able to heavily modify our ships, and have that represented visually, however, would be pretty damn cool.
Also, do you really want to see all those space dongs flying around?
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So, in order of importance...
Space Dongs: That is what the 1950's essentially thought space travel was going to be anyways.
Ships being built from scratch... all those years of R&D... and how much of it could have been done by players? Now I'm not saying it would detract from what Frontier does. That's the same thing that car manufacturers deal with today is what I'm saying. And yet there are people out there that fabricate and build their own custom cars. Make it difficult and complicated so it doesn't get stupid. Problem solved. But the ability to see more interesting designs? That would make it worth it in and of itself and when you add in it opening the door to more active roles in Economics and even Politics, not to mention maybe even opening up the door to better exploration and combat.
But even being able to heavily modify our ships visually would be nice, so yea. Hull shape changes. Changes in location on the ship where things like the engines are actually located. Variable geometry engine pylons could be a lot of fun.
Starbase is actually way off the mark of what I'm thinking. That's entirely too much. I'm just talking about building custom ships. Not engineering every little aspect of it, not building entire space stations, not, when your controls stop working, having to go down to engineering and directly control the electronics, valves, and engines to get it going in the right direction again - ect ect. That kind of thing is NOT what I'm looking for. I'm talking about custom ships, and yall are talking about damned near needing an engineering degree.
But that's the thing, building a car and building a spaceship are two vastly different things.
Yeah, people build custom cars, but not a lot of people build custom supersonic aircraft, to use a 21'st century example. (Idea being that while I could see a talented engineer in the ED universe building custom aircraft or the like, using AI and advanced manufacturing techniques of the 33'rd century, an interstellar, combat ready spaceship construction still feels like more than a one man job to me)
And that's not even touching on any of the actual ED lore related to ship manufacturers. The anaconda, for example, is something like a 500+ year old design that is still used today, which to me suggests that building a good spacecraft in ED is a major undertaking, and doesn't happen too often.
There's also the problem of requiring some sort of system that would dynamically generate a custom flight model for your creations (which is another reason I think heavy modification of existing ship platforms would be the way to go.)
Look, the mechanic could definitely be cool, but I just think it would introduce more bad than good, especially in terms of balancing, huge sink of dev time and only further muddying the already unfocused direction of what this game wants to be.
And when I say space dongs, I was more so talking about ships built specifically to look as phallic as possible or similar intentionally goofy/offensive designs.