Yes, yes and... yes.
No matter how monosyllabic we get, it changes nothing to the fact that it would make absolute sense in-fiction, and that it wouldn't change much to the balance of the ships anyway. The Cutter's already the best trader in the game, and passenger missions aren't different from trading missions.
It really boggles the mind that the ferrying progression curve should be given a hard stop with the beluga... and for the beluga to be such a riddiculously under-powered and badly balanced ship...
Supposedly the most luxurious ship out there, but same price as a type-9 (What the?)... Biggest mass and FSD of all ships, but its mass lock factor (18) means it can still get mass locked by the "Big three" (
seriously?)... Meant for nothing but cruising from system to system but its jump range is mediocre (Oh come on now!)... Also it's the only ship that will litterally
overheat if it jumps while sporting a G5 OC PP (unfair... I've tried nearly all other ships, none have this issue)... Also some of its too-few internal slots are inaccessible for most modules, making it tedious to outfit (this better be related to there being a dance floor or something)... Also it has such small internals that its shields have to be made of paper, but you can't really engineer them correctly, because it's so power-starved that engineering it is a complete nightmare (see the effects of a G5 OC PP)...
If passenger missions are really going to be a serious career in Elite, players are going to need a top-tier passenger ship, like all other trades get. And by top-tier, I mean one that isin't... ^ THAT.
And even if you made the Cutter the best passenger ship... it'd still be
less versatile than the Conda! So I don't really know what all that refusal comes from...
Moreover, I think it's just silly that Frontier pretty much "forced" luxury cabins into the only 2 pasenger ships. It's a very, very artificial way of making them relevant, that exists primarily to offset the fact that those ships would just not be used otherwise, because they are useless compared to other vessels.
Instead, how about we liberalize the use of luxury cabins, but actually make the orca and beluga
interesting options? Missions that require luxury cabins aren't SO magnificient and well-paying that we'd like to buy a new ship
just for them. I bought mine because it's shiny, not for luxury missions alone.
Disclaimer : I am the owner of both a cutter and a corvette (and also a mothballed beluga) so I may have a vested interest into this. However, I am vehemently in favor of a massive nerf to the difficulty of obtaining the cutter and vette, because they aren't worth THAT much of a grind as it is.
You know, all in all, what bothers me most with ship balancing right now, having acquired nearly every ship and played with them extensively, is that if anyone looking for engame progression asked me what ship to strive for, I'd systematically direct them towards an Anaconda and tell them not to bother with the rest. The Corvette and Cutter's slight advantages aren't worth the grindwall (and their combat abilities are necessarily neutered by PVP balancing, so they aren't that much of an improvement), while the 'Conda's jump range, armament, hardiness, cargo capacity, acquisition difficulty etc. makes it just so massively superior to all ships that you really need to be stupidly rich (or rather, stupid and rich, just like me) to go for anything else, althought lighter vessels are now clearly better for RES hunting, I'll give them that. I'm pretty certain that someone with a Conda will end up making more cash than someone with a beluga just doing passenger missions, even with luxury missions out of the picture.
