Minor balance issue related to the Kostroma system, the amount of freebies in the inner ring system is a bit excessive.
On the one hand, yes, DME's hand-crafted systems are full of interesting things in ways that most other systems aren't.
On the other hand,
I don't want that to change, because it is
interesting. Honestly, I'd like to see more little hidden secrets, abandoned ships, etcetera, in other systems. (Hm... I could probably make a mod that adds some of that sort of thing? Worth playing around with, at least...)
If Harmful Mechanic does decide this needs balancing, I'd rather see an increase in automated defenses - a weapons cache that's guarded is still interesting, even if it might be something you'd have to come back to later rather than being just free loot from the start of the game.
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And on an unrelated topic: I really like the deserter freighter designs - it's nice to have something that can actually compete with just spamming colossi. (Note that that's 'compete', not 'replace'; the Colossus remains significantly more supply-efficient, as well as offering more cargo space per ship slot spent on freighters.) And the built-in nav relay means I actually do deploy them into battle on occasion - especially early on when fights are small enough that I'm not seeing capturable nav nodes on the map.
...That said, I think they'd still be viable with a small decrease to cargo capacity (maybe ~10% less?), and I'd consider upping the burn speed of the Light Cargo Rig to 10 - right now there's very little reason to consider using LCRs rather than HCRs. At burn 10 they'd still be niche, but they'd at least
have a niche. (This may be somewhat personal preference, though? Late game, my fleets tend to stabilize at around burn 8, as that covers most cruisers and battlecruisers, with occasional bumps up to burn 10 if I bring out a frigate fleet or start putting Augmented Drive Field on things. Burn 9 just... doesn't come up as being an important breakpoint for me.)
