These changes and additions sound great, I can't wait to play the new release.
I'm particularly interested in the changes to Combat Readiness, as I always felt that CR was (both generally, and specifically for me/my playstyle of Tri-Tachyon medium-large ship fleets) too heavy of a burden and in a way, felt sort of arbitrary. I felt there was too much pressure in terms of time and cost to either quickly find more combat to get more supplies or run back to a station to sell off loot, while my supplies are ticking away. Too many times I would get low on supplies, start flying to a station, and as I run out of supplies, my ships start disintegrating right before my eyes. I don't mean to take these changes as a "buff" or "nerf", I just mean that I like the sound of them and I'm eager to see how these tweaks feel for both balance and fun.
And will there be a way for haulers to be nerfed in terms of smuggling capacity in a similar way to how the new hullmod works, ie extra thin cargohold?
And could you make cargoholds discriminate specific items, such that for example my faction's hauler could only carry supplies and fuel but no commodities? Or maybe only supplies, fuel, an "energy cells" commodity and guns?
No to all, though you could probably code around that if you really wanted to. As far as the player, though, cargo capacity is cargo capacity. I can't really imagine doing something like "X of your capacity can only be used on Ore", etc.
Secondly, after reading the above quotes by Zudgemud and yourself it occurred to me that there could be certain cargo ships that were naturally (i.e. permanent hull-mod) better equipped to handle certain types of cargo. Not in a cut-and-dry manner as freighters, fuel tankers and personnel transports are currently. Instead certain ship hulls may reduce the cargo space per unit of a given item, Supplies for instance, by a percentage, and increase the space cost of another item(s) by a percentage. Though, after giving it a few more minutes thought I can't really fit the idea into the game thematically, and I don't see a need for it for gameplay reasons. I thought I would mention it anyway in case it sparked an idea for someone else.
That said, I like the idea of mixed-use as well as dedicated transport types. Tankers, cargo freighters and personnel transports are all great, but just for variety it'd be cool to see freighters that look and function as half built for one purpose and half built for another. For instance a ship that looks half tanker (with the signature orange color and bulbous tanker style) and half cargo freighter (styled like the Atlas or other freighters) with stats to reflect this. No urgency for this addition, of course.
I love the game, keep up the great work.
Edit: Specifically for long and narrow ships, the perfectly circular shield shape ends up taking up a lot of unnecessary space, and the larger the ship the goofier it seems. What're your thoughts on the idea of allowing some ships to have more oval-shaped shields in order to better fit the hull shape?