On Us S in general, have you given any thought to 'generalising' the faction specific ship parts?
e.g. Reinforced Federation Plates, which I pick up on occasion when I flit out to the 'south' side of the Sector, are pretty useless to me, because I don't have any useful federation blueprints.
I guess, I'm concerned that the specificity of the parts makes having to 'Farm' that faction as the only solution to making more ships - particularly when Walking t' Void. Sometimes I don't want to do that.
It might be nicer if there was a bit of synergy to some of the specific parts, particularly the more 'generic' (at least in terms of lore) factions (or ships?)
e.g. Junk Pirates and IFED are, as far as I can tell, pretty normal in terms of engineering. It might be reasonable to be able to make them from 'normal' (hi / low / mid) parts.
SHI and BRDY are a bit specialist, perhaps its reasonable to keep these separate - especially the headliners like the Desdinova or Imaginos (or even the relatively specialist Seski).
Would make accidental blueprint gains more useful (whether that is a good or bad thing), especially if the intention is to reduce the frequency of blueprint drops.
The thought occured to me, anyway, not sure if you had thought about anything like that (and I appreciate it would be a lot of work to replan)
Mmh, actually the situation right now works like this:
Every ship needs 4 part types: vanilla ships (+ TuP, cyc's PP and meso's TiM) only need either low, mid or high tech parts for every type (armor, scrap, engine and flux). These are basically high, mid, low tech components, 4 of each type, so there are the 16 "vanilla" parts in the game. These are very common and easy to find, and with them one can build most of the ships. Every extra tech (BR, SHI, NOM, PCK...) add 1 more type, for example PCK uses lowtech scraps (generalistic), lowtech flux(generalistic), lowtech engines(generalistic), and pck armor(specialistic). So "farming" pieces for the "non-vanilla" factions is somewhat a requirement to use their ship, unless you find their components in some other way *events, hint hint*.
EDIT: New Dev with the things in the screenshots!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tucwn1rjj6bd692/UomozSector.7z