Nice to have feature: ship design and build

Mugur

M
What do you think of the possibility to be able to design in-game a new ship model? A sort of combination of a "Holo-Me" for ships (template based) and to be able to assign module sizes, hardpoints, utility slots, etc. With some logical constraints, of course.

For example, if I put a size 8 FSD, I won't be able to put a less than 6 life support. I will be able to set a number of optional internals, but I should respect a total volume (size) or a total number of modules, or both. You get the idea.

This way, we can go with ship customization to extreme and we'll see a lot of funny builds. We would be able to create the "perfect" explorer ship or the fastest racer with paper-thin armour, or a crazy 10 hardpoints fighter, but slow as hell.

The custom ships shouldn't make every other ship in the game obsolete. They will simply be a sort of extremely unbalanced build for a niche role.
 

Watcher

W
Being able to spec out a ship and modules within the existing set of ships and modules would be nice...
So you can work out a build before embarking on creating it - basically something like coriolis.io but in game..

Perhaps limit what you can do to modules you've 'seen', however that gets marked.
Perhaps provide the option to order stuff in at extra cost and time for delivery from various stations - you'd probably want to balance this so that doing this yourself still makes sense but if you're willing to blow the cash you can do it this way, maybe use it more for ordering in the odd module that is nearby but a hassle to go fetch.

Full on ship building is a much bigger can of worms.
FD would need to come up with some very nifty algorithms for how different module configurations interact and what sort of trade offs you can have. Ideally you'd tie this to module placement as well so you could build notionally similar ships module wise but with different characteristics based on layout - could get a bit kerbal.
In general I'd love something like this but, unfortunately, I'm not sure it really has a place in ED. The can of worms is just too big, the balancing and related issue would be extreme.
 
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Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Lovely idea, but would end up with even more overpowered PvP gank ships. I'd imagine the 'real' PvP'ers would not be so keen either given the TTK on current builds.

Mind you, a medium ship (with a decent cockpit) jumping further than a 'conda...
 

Watcher

W
Ratkatcher said:
Lovely idea, but would end up with even more overpowered PvP gank ships. I'd imagine the 'real' PvP'ers would not be so keen either given the TTK on current builds.

Mind you, a medium ship (with a decent cockpit) jumping further than a 'conda...
Click to expand...

Could do all sorts of interesting things here. But yeah one of the immediate things would be to build a generally small light weight ship with the biggest FSD bay you are allowed to fit.
Other things would be ships with many medium or small sized optional bays - this would tend to expose the problem with bigger modules being significantly proportionally worse in most instances - despite much bigger size, weight and cost.

How you make this all work aesthetically I'm not sure. Outside of ED I've toyed around with the idea of using some sort of ships systems placement mechanic and then having the engine come up with a procedurally generated frame around this.
Theoretically you could tie this to some tweakable parameters both functional and aesthetic - perhaps a tougher/heavier hull would look bulkier for instance. And can you create algorithms for more flowing styles of ships versus angular?
Anyway, that is a way wider discussion :)
 
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