Every person makes the decision to spend their time in the Ship Designer volunteerily. This is not a necessity.
In a competitive game, voluntarily often is a necessity to remain competitive. Pro FPS players might not have to invest an hour per day in Aimlab training their aim, but if they don't, someone else is, and they will lose. So even though there are ships to buy, you're heavily incentivized to spend a lot of time in the SSC to learn ship design and so on - you're almost required to know how to use the minigame known as the SSC, which removes you from the game universe and any player interaction, in order to figure out ship design. If instead the game were more about upgrading and patching up your ship with friends in the live game world, you'd have more longevity with people trying to make the best out of what they have, versus the SSC, where you make the best of the best, and then scrap it the moment it loses any part you don't have an immediate replacement for.
ou're basically saying here that you have a problem with the ship replacement, and then immediately advocating for the system with specific number that allows you to replace the ship for less than its full price. This is a self-contradicting position.
It's not, but I understand it's confusion. Replacement is what we have currently: print new ship with everything on it. You pay maybe 120% of the total ship cost based on material cost and assembly (I don't know the exact amount).
Insurance would be paying some amount, say 25% in my example, to insure a ship "as it currently exists in the game" for replacement. This means every time you make a significant upgrade, you pay the insurance cost. You would buy a standard frame of a ship, then slap on whatever kind of weapons you liked, and then insure it. Upon "loss" you then spend another 25% of the total cost (in addition to material cost) to recover the ship as it was when you insured it. In this way, you've lost at least 50% of the value - losing more value than the SSC printing - but only kept the ship as it was when you assembled it in the live game world. Meaning... if you had autocannons on your ship when you insured it, but found someone's ship with lasers, and refitted your ship with lasers, but didn't insure it, your "replacement" would have autocannons. However, if you went back to a station and paid another 25% of the total value, you could insure the new "blueprint" as-is. It sinks more money out of the system because each time you want to "save" your blueprint there is a credit cost to it and a game mechanic to it (insurance).
Now, I don't like insurance at all, and the numbers or costs and so on are irrelevant; the approach is simply to turn the "SSC save-blueprint" thing into a credit-cost in the game world that does away with the SSC. I'm pointing out how it's more viable and playable (fun) than printing a new, fully operational, perfectly designed, perfectly efficient, fully armed, full-ammo ship over and over again. Why buy ammo when you can just print off ammo, for example? Why have a tech tree when you can just go into the SSC and print off parts you need? It devalues so much to have everything so easily accessible.
So uh... basically you stand against people improving upon their designs? I mean, if you build you own ship, you naturally would want to improve upon it. Even if they'd use insurance for their current ships to restore them to their most recent blueprint update, how does that would stand in the way for a designer to improve the design and build ships with more adjustments? Why do you think its fair to penalize people for their creativity?
No, just that the way designs are improved are in a 3D editor which bypasses 90% of the game mechanics found in the game world. You can put parts so tightly together that you cannot ever access anything from your player character. So if something breaks, you just print a new ship - no use in trying to repair. Without the SSC, people would need hallways, access hatches, crawlspaces and much more to make a ship viable, because you'd have to route power and fuel through accessible places, by hand. You can improve your design all you want, but doing so within the limits of the game world. This would lead to dynamic and interesting ships, versus "perfectly designed and balanced and efficient" ships as is currently the case in the SSC. Players would be working on their ship's design over time during gameplay instead of being bored with nothing to do if you're not the pilot because it's easier to just go into the SSC and mess with a ship design (which again, takes that player out of the game world).
If your ship was "piece-meal" built from other scrapped ships, you're much more likely to want friends around to help you salvage, scrap, pull apart other ships, and then use that stuff to upgrade your own, as each person lightens the work effort for the team in getting things done. How it stands now, the "SSC designer guy" who made the ship is going to just go off and work on the design and your friends sit around useless waiting for the next iteration, for example. And then those friends go into the SSC and get locked into their own design and no one is playing the game.
Now lets imagine how many of those creative friends and company's creative members that busy designing ships would do these operations manually?
Perfect example of why the SSC is bad - thanks for sharing! If you didn't have the SSC to go beyond your means, you wouldn't have had that problem in the first place. You wouldn't have a 64 triangle thruster array to work with. You'd want to play the game and get out and do things and settle with "good enough" for an 8-engine ship, or maybe make a fleet with friends of 3-4, 8-engine ships, to do the same work. But instead you went off and made something that took 18 hours to re-do because you initially made a design that does not work within the game world - it works super efficient and flawless in the SSC but the moment any issue arises, it's not a quick fix. Without the SSC, since every part would have to be placed by hand, it can come off by hand, and replaced simply and easily, as was seemingly 'promised' to us in the trailer videos.
If you want to buy a basic miner and convert it gradually into a light fighter, you can do it right now. Where's the hiccup?
You're much better off not doing conversion, because you can just print a fighter when you want a fighter, and a miner when you need a miner, and have no reason to hybridize your designs, or work with parts you find in the wild. Better to just print what you need. Since you currently have the better option easily accessible to you - just hop into the SSC, load up someone else's fighter, and print it off - there's zero reason you'd ever convert your miner to a fighter.
you're essentially saying that designing new ship frames and improving them is bad
I'm saying the way it's done is bad, not the act itself. The SSC forces all ship changes to go through it for the most part (blueprint system currently available is a small exception but even then, a good ship designer is going to go into the SSC because blueprints are not permanent, so it's better to just edit the base blueprint for anything major, again... forcing people out of the game and into the SSC constantly).
If instead, after doing some major in-game-world ship design and improvement, I want to 'save' this for later, going to pay some premium for insuring it "as-is" is a good step towards removing people from the SSC. The cost is more, not less (I mean, it could be more, or less, since it's just a number, but... should be more, not less), and because you don't get to "edit" the insured ship before you get the replacement, you get it back as it was and have to do whatever changes you want to do after that. It would be like saving your ship when it hits "Level 50" and then playing until it hits "Level 60" but then it gets killed, so you get back the "Level 50" version and have to continue pushing its limits again, with new knowledge of how that ship frame works to get you back to where you were faster. But it's still a setback, still means something, and cheap-skate players or those who never plan to leave the safe zone can avoid insurance altogether and so on.
The starter ship experience at the release of Early Access was super good. You had a small little ship that you upgraded over time. This was fun, and you sort of worked with friends on this, but not by bolting and assembling (more, they just helped provide resources). Then, you got enough credits, where instead of upgrading or making a new frame or anything of the sort, you hopped into the SSC, avoided all players for days and days, made a decent ship, tested it in the SSC test mode, and then came out with a massive fully functional very efficient ship that devalued any step between starter ship and end-game ship. 0 to 100. Anyone who did not go 0-100 was punished due to the market getting flooded with cheap resources, where a top-end miner could haul back millions per run, but a starter ship could only haul back a few hundred thousand worth at best.
