Online ship buying terminal

[sweer]

the current way you buy playermade ships is simply not scalable with the playerbase, I think a much better solution would to be adding a terminal in the market place (or even a different shop) for all I care, and making it so you can buy any ship uploaded to say the ship cloud, or even just its blueprint. Because in the current state of ship shops, if the game were to go into EA, alot of people would want to put their ships on the shop, devs wouldnt have time to verify each of these, or even the room on stations to put more ship shops, and not alot would even be bought because people would have to go shop to shop finding the one they want. however with this terminal blueprint system you can get any blueprint you need and make the ship your self, or even just buy the ship and say tow it to you. this scales with the playerbase, and if the creator of the ship gets a portion of the money they used to buy it it can help the economy, because say, part of the fee could be due to blueprints, and thats what the creator gets. so now designing ships is a viable job, devs have to do minimal interaction aside from moderating the shop a bit (or even a report button could work). With this solution you can also keep in person shops for ships that stand out

 

[five]

I really like this idea. You would like have a preview like, maybe in the ship designer where you can look at it and maybe even testfly it.

 

[sweer]

ehhh, I think maybe you shouldnt be able to test fly it, but instead you can leave maybe a review?

 

[XenoCow]

devs wouldnt have time to verify each of these, or even the room on stations to put more ship shops

This would be a problem if EA were to release today. However, the devs have said that the current method for having player ships put in the ship shops by devs is temporary. Once we get station building (or potentially sooner Interior Design coming soon), players will be able to build their own ship shops and stock them themselves.

Also, I'd like to point you to my discussion about single use blueprints that could be a potential solution to this problem in much the same way as you are proposing but more in-line with the "physical" theme of SB.

Additionally, if you're just looking for a catalog, I could see big ship building companies making their own websites to host videos, reviews, and the specs on their ships. Players with less web-design experience could use the wiki to host much the same thing too.

 

[Verbatos]

I don't think a website would be a good way to go for this, it would be better to have everything self-contained. As Xeno said there are plans in place for players to be able to make their own ship shops in the future.

Also, I think that test-fly is a necessity. It would be a pain in the ass to buy a nice looking ship and realise it is hot garbage.