Well, the
original design had an offline mode, and assets like this would require a client patch to update. (And that remained the case for space-based assets until 2.3 was released)
Sure, if they hadn't originally planned an offline mode, they might well have handled asset positioning very differently. And if they'd had an initial design that wasn't (hailed by the pre-order players at the time as great, still looked back on as a mystical "game we never got" by some) which was basically FFE+multiplayer+BGS, then the need to handle live moves of stations might have come up at some much earlier point in the process.
But at that point you're basically into "if this was a completely different game it might be easier to do that", which is true, I guess.
...
Of course, it's not just where the game thinks the megaship is that's the problem. Adjusting the server code so that for certain asset classes the position is checked regularly, not just on entry into the system, is probably not the hard bit.
Questions like:
- what happens if you're logged in on the ship when it jumps (what do you see?)
- does it matter if you're in the hangar or not?
- what happens if you hit Launch and your ship starts the launch sequence with the landing pad two seconds before the scheduled jump time?
- what happens if you're multicrewed into a ship which does this?
- what happens if you're in the instance with the ship, but not docked?
- what happens if you're in supercruise heading for the ship's instance when it jumps?
- what happens if you're in supercruise in the arrival system?
- what happens if you're in the appropriate bit of real space in the arrival system (having waited since its last departure, perhaps?)
- what happens if you're exactly where it wants to arrive in that scenario?
- what happens if multiple people are docked to the ship, with computers of different setups and therefore different "load new system" delays?
- ... across several instances with a bunch of wings and friends and blocks to make it tougher?
- if the ship has outfitting or shipyard, what happens if you call a module to it, which won't arrive until after it's moved? What happens if you try to call a module from it but it moves between you opening the transfer screen and putting the request in?
- how does legal jurisdiction for the ship work? Does it change if it moves systems? Is this exploitable?
An appropriate underlying design can certainly make it easier ... but these are all also going to be tough implementation problems to get working with only minor bugs. (Consider how buggy multicrew is - and certainly how it was in 2.3 - which has some parallel issues to that but mostly skips the harder ones)
