Differentiating ships

[OddBob]

On IRC Betel and I were thinking of some ways to differentiate ships more.

The first is sets (as discussed often elsewhere, a set is a bunch of items, devices, or ships that, if you have all of them, provide a bonus) - if a ship is part of a set it may be better with energy weapons for example, or have a bonus with corporate armor or basically anything else you can think of.

The second is refitting ships - ships have different parts that you can replace or customize (either from the shop or scavenged) and some ships might have more option than others, one may allow you to bolt on whatever you want to the outside while one can't be modified at all.

The third is armor and weapon mounts. Ships can have varying amounts of armor segments and more than one weapon mount (meaning you may fire more than one weapon at a time) this can also apply to launchers, with some ships having extra ones or none.

[Betelgeuse]

the refitting idea came from talk about building your own ships on a frame (so to solve the graphics problem)

I just thought of a new issue in the interaction between sets and building or refitting or ships. ie how do you define what ship has enhancements to energy weapons if you are allowing players to build there own ships.

The first thing that comes to mind is instead of saying a ship is part of a set you could say that an component of the ship is part of a set.

ie.
a ship frame that gives bonuses to armor hp
a weapons mount that gives bonuses to energy weapons

That way you can have ships have set bonuses while allowing for customization of ships and even would make it easier to add modded ships (if they use components already parts of ships the modder doesn't have to add them to get the ship set bonuses)