Some ideas to make the ships a lot cooler. In no particular order.
1) Hit point (hp) and repair modules.
Example ship A has 16 space, 6 hp, and 100% repair.
Adding a 4 hp, 4 space, 20 credit module and a 30% repair, 2 space, 15 credit module.
Ship A now has 10 remaining spaces, 10 hp, 130% repair, and costs 35 extra credits.
2) Sunken spaces for guns and engines. Would be neat if the spaces opened before the guns fire!
3) Holes in the ships. Would be nice to have a ship bay / docking port.
4) Moddable hulls. If we can change the components why not the hulls? Maybe make a screen just for that and put all the structures there. Then the old ship design screen can just be for components (weapons, defense, etc..).
5) How do the ships turn?
6) Defense modules should not add hardpoints to the ship. Why should adding armor to the *whole* ship add a little blob to the hull? It would be better to just leave the ship as it is without the extra hardpoint.
7) I like the idea of having defense components. So you want a deflector array, find a parabola from the list and paste it on your ship. Giant spheres would be cool for shields. Retexturing the ship or adding tiny circling fighters would be interesting. Maybe even a glowing something around the ship. But no mandatory hardpoints!
8) Defense should take up 0 space but cost the same. Most defense consists of things like electroplating the ships hull. By definition defense is an expensive thing that does not really change the capacity of ships. Besides right now almost everyone is ignoring defense in favor of extreme offense. Eliminating the space requirement would really change the dynamics of the game making it much more interesting. Remember defense is not cheap. Adding it could double or even triple the cost of ships. Finally, this is what all the other cool games in history have done.
