Ship kits are OK, but need purpose and character!

[foxoplasma]

Ship kits are really cool, and it's great that they are a thing in the game.
However, the vast majority of the parts are focused on just adding pieces to the hull, like extra wings or aerodynamic parts.



This means that while they look COOL, almost none of them add any /character/ to the ship itself, with the big exception being the Raider ship kit.


The Raider ship kit to me is very good because it adds actual personality, purpose, customization to the ship kit itself!

Most of the others only add extra small pieces, with a few exceptions like the sensor arrays on type 6/keelback? and Chieftain, and i think this is a trend that really should be considered going forwards.

I've had a bunch of ideas for more ship kits, possibly some that could be universal and reused, fitted on to multiple ship hulls using the same model.

• Utility/rescue ship kit!

This would be a ship kit adding round auxillary fuel tank pieces to the exteriors of the ship, maybe with bright hazard marks and lighting!

Also very nice would be some robotic repair/reaching arms like on space stations, for those fuel rats carrying repair limpets or scooping up escape pods!

• Military ship kit!

One nice feature here would be metallic armor parts that attach on to important parts of the hull, like (visually) shielding important areas of the ship such as the power plant or engines. They could also have alternate versions with scratches, laser burns and bullet holes in them!

Another cool idea i had with this would be having auxillary (and again completely visual) small turrets on the ship, like machine guns, optical rangefinders, lots of other useful small parts that would be good in a fight to have.

• Explorer ship kit !

Last one on my list, a ship kit for explorers. This would be focused on adding sensor arrays, long booms (like the one the Krait had before it was sadly removed ), and observation rooms/cupolas.

 

[Skip Rockbounder]

Well, I think you've unwittingly pointed out a bit of a hot spot for double standards by some of the fans of ED... some spend real money on aero kits for their ships to make em' look different and take picture after picture to use as screen savers... yet many of those same 'fans' of Ed demand that a new ship isn't just a re-skin of an existing one, it's gotta have different statistics for it's own niche otherwise it's they complain it's copy and paste.

Personally I'd love to see the cobra, viper, clipper... or whatever have an identical set of stats to a ship made by a rival company the more the merrier I say, and if you could buy 'for real money' a kit on top of that then all well and good, and if it made a Players 'whatever' ship look like it's got wings/scanner lances/bubbles and stuff for a reason then it might just sell more kits.

I wonder if ED will pinch this suggestion... though it can only be cosmetic of course!

 

[Speedcuffs]

Raider kit for T9.[yesnod]

 

[Awarkle]

External Lighting kit like search lights for "search and rescue"