THE PROBLEM: if I want to put an "arch" on my ship, it will have to be anchored on only one side. Or, if I want to use the "roll bar" jewel (the one that looks like the roll bar on the USS Reliant from Star Trek II), I can't make it arch above my ship without putting a support right in the middle.
THE SOLUTION: an "invisible stick"; a long, thin structure like the antennae, that attaches at one end, and has a few hardpoints along it, and one on the end. This stick is translucent on the ship design screen, but is NOT RENDERED AT ALL elsewhere in the game.
Uses:
1) For arches, as noted above;
2) For jewels with inconvenient attachment points. Say, the end you want sticking out is the one that attaches to the hull, so you put an invisible stick pointing outward in the direction you want, and attach the jewel to the end, pointing in;
3) "Whiskers" (ala SeaQuest DSV), you can have little unattached glowing balls hovering near your ship;
4) Squadrons: using Kryo's hull mod, you could have a single "ship" that consists of three ships attached to the central single-hardpoint hull.
These would probably be fun. I guess the trick is how hard they would be to implement. One possibility might be to have them be a single wire (rather than a whole wireframe), but that might also be pretty unwieldly.
What do y'all think?
