One-time Use Blueprints: Propietary ship sales over long distance

XenoCow

Master endo
Joined
Dec 10, 2019
Messages
566
#1
-- Summary --
Blueprints of ships can be stamped onto chips that can be used once to construct a ship at a ship design center or to introduce scarcity into the market.


-- The Problem --
There are two problems that this proposed solution can solve:
  1. Ship manufacturers cannot easily sell their ships in markets that they did not set up without compromising their copyrights.
  2. Shipping ships over long distance is costly.
Under the current plan, ship designers need to set up their own ship shops to sell their designs (or have them hosted in developer build stations). This means that players need to have shops spread all over to get their ships sold all around Eos.

Alternatively, ship designers could share their blueprints with other players and have them run their shops and give a cut to the designer. There is no guarantee that the deal is upheld, though.


-- The Solution --
Allow players to stamp a "physical" chip with a blueprint. These blueprint chips could be shipped to ship shops all over and sold as a commodity. The blueprint chips could only be used once at a ship shop or space ship creator terminal. I imagine a sort of vending machine looking thing where players insert their chips, pay the cost of buying the ship materials, like we do now from within the SSC, then get their ship.

Blank chips could be purchased or manufactured. Then designs could be stamped onto them at SSCs (perhaps for a price to the station owner). Racks could hold many of the chips, in a similar way that YOLOL chip racks do for easy transportation.


-- Implications --
Ship designers would now be able to sell one-time-use copies of their designs to ship shops all around Eos. Merchants could buy stock of blueprint chips from various designers from all over and sell them to players who run ship shops.

Ship designers who cannot afford their own ship shops could now have their designs sold with little to no upfront costs.

Designers who want their ships to be rare and valuable could limit how many chips they sell as to introduce scarcity, thus increasing the cost of their ships.

Pirates could try to steal the blueprint chips from merchants to sell on the black market.

Ships would not need to be shipped long distances because players and factions could just bring chips of their ships with them and leave their old ships behind.

Bootleg versions of ships could be sold by mischievous salesendos to unsuspecting ship shops or for players who want ships that are a bit cheaper than the brand name ones.
 
Last edited:

ChaosRifle

Veteran endo
Joined
Aug 11, 2020
Messages
226
#2
Buying a license to manufacture one copy of a ship rather than the ship, enforced by 'encrypted' DRM. I like it. Shipwrights AFAIK currently dont have particularly great tools to sell their designs.

I would imagine the person that imprinted the chips could re-imprint them to update them, or maybe just magicaly update chips when the imprinter changes the blueprint??


If rewriting was physical and couldnt be done remotely, I would love to see a version number and a revision number that a shipwright could set in this case, so you could have situations where V3 A4 is the one you want, the V3 A1 had a horrible design flaw that got fixed in the A2 update, and A3 had QoL improvements, etc...
 

XenoCow

Master endo
Joined
Dec 10, 2019
Messages
566
#3
Shipwrights AFAIK currently dont have particularly great tools to sell their designs.
There's only the developer run ship shops that players can submit their ships to be considered for. Players don't earn any money for those sales, though.
 
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