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[Xanderzoo]

Currently when a ship is recovered after being disabled it will be repaired with no difficulties. I think that there should be a smallish possibility that the ship becomes a (D) class. Another thing I was thinking of is that you might be able to repair (D) class ships back into their normal state for large amounts of credits.

[Megas]

If I cannot repair (D), it is good as dead, and I will scuttle it immediately to cut on overhead.

[nomadic_leader]

Agree with Megas.

In this situation when you recover a ship you don't always get all the weapons it had on it, correct? I think that is close enough, since it's a punishment, but it's one you can recover from.

if there were other buyable things (ie not hullmods) that changed ship stats then those also could be lost in such situation, but there aren't unfortunately, at least in vanilla.

[Megas]

Most weapons from a ship that was repaired or captured are lost.  Some weapons are harder to replace than some ships.  Also, any hullmods that were on the ship (and not builtin) are gone.

[nomadic_leader]

Actually why do D ships even exist? it kind of annoys me that the game has customizable spaceships, but oh this one is not customizable, it's just irredeemably worse version of some other ship.

If you want some factions to have crappy versions of the ship, they should just be under-utilizing their Ordnance Points, since they don't have enough skills or weapons or something.

[Megas]

We probably have (D) ships so that player can beat up pirates, who use mostly (D) ships, without getting wiped.  (i.e., wimps beginners can kill to gain XP.)  In earlier versions, two or three pirates with normal ships against your lone frigate is hard for the inexperienced player, and contributed to the inverted difficulty.

For the player, most degraded hullmods found on (D) ships are so bad that no ship is better than a bad ship slowing your fleet and/or eating more Logistics and supplies than necessary.  The only time a (D) ship is good in my fleet is suiciding as a Hermes (D) flagship (from the abandoned station) then respawning in a brand new frigate in Corvus.

[orost]

I've been toying with the idea of replacing (D) with a meter of "permanent structural damage" that ships slowly accrue every time they're badly beaten up and that causes gradually harsher penalties as it increases. It would make the strangely artificial (D) mechanic more organic, introduce wear-and-tear into the player's fleet and make taking a lot of damage but not dying have an actually meaningful downside.

Ideally I'd want a four-tier system of increasingly long-scale damage: CR, armor and hull (as it is now), structural damage (accrues slowly when taking lots of hull damage, can only be repaired at a drydock for a significant price in credits and time), permanent structural damage (accrues very slowly, no repairs, once it gets too high the hull goes to scrap). It would add some long-term dimension to fleet management and consequence to taking damage, as I hate how anything short of complete destruction can be immediately and completely fixed at any dock for a small sum of money in supplies. I suspect it would get instantly shot down as "too complex", though.

[SafariJohn]

Ideally I'd want a four-tier system of increasingly long-scale damage: CR, armor and hull (as it is now), structural damage (accrues slowly when taking lots of hull damage, can only be repaired at a drydock for a significant price in credits and time), permanent structural damage (accrues very slowly, no repairs, once it gets too high the hull goes to scrap). It would add some long-term dimension to fleet management and consequence to taking damage, as I hate how anything short of complete destruction can be immediately and completely fixed at any dock for a small sum of money in supplies. I suspect it would get instantly shot down as "too complex", though.

I think that sounds pretty good, actually.

[Midnight Kitsune]

I've been toying with the idea of replacing (D) with a meter of "permanent structural damage" that ships slowly accrue every time they're badly beaten up and that causes gradually harsher penalties as it increases. It would make the strangely artificial (D) mechanic more organic, introduce wear-and-tear into the player's fleet and make taking a lot of damage but not dying have an actually meaningful downside.

Ideally I'd want a four-tier system of increasingly long-scale damage: CR, armor and hull (as it is now), structural damage (accrues slowly when taking lots of hull damage, can only be repaired at a drydock for a significant price in credits and time), permanent structural damage (accrues very slowly, no repairs, once it gets too high the hull goes to scrap). It would add some long-term dimension to fleet management and consequence to taking damage, as I hate how anything short of complete destruction can be immediately and completely fixed at any dock for a small sum of money in supplies. I suspect it would get instantly shot down as "too complex", though.

What about boarded ships though? It is already very expensive to get them fully recovered and if you are going to add another expense on top of it AND GREATLY shorten its lifespan, then boarding would have to be completely reworked

[orost]

@Midnight Kitsune

The boarding and capture system needs a rework anyway. I'd really want to see ways to capture a ship without blowing it up first, by surrender or by boarding action in combat, and that would work best with my idea.

You can make it work with the current system, though, you just have to pick the right numbers. Say you make disabling a ship and then recovering it with proper equipment cause 5% of permanent damage. That's noticeable, but assuming the ship was in decent condition to begin with, perfectly usable.

[Xanderzoo]

Here's a different idea: How about, when boarding enemy ships, instead of collateral damage completely destroying the ship, it instead just converts it into a (D) variant? That way you can at least sell it.

[Protonus]

Hmm...

For sure, D-ships are excitingly cheap to come by, but I doubt it is going to be effectively fun in my choice unless they are repairable in some (non)existing (yet) shipyard with my bank account allowed to do so.

[Serenitis]

Personally, I'd like to see D ships be semi-randomised.
In other words every time a D ship is spawned somewhere it's essentially a normal ship with a flag on it which tells the game to add 1-to-x number of hull mods from this table over here containing all the 'negative' (or otherwise interesting) ones.
This way you'd still get all the broken ships for the pirates, but they wouldn't feel as homogenous as they do now (something which really feels off about the pirates - all their ships are indentical), and the RNG will eventually give you some ships that might be tempting enough to keep should the opportunity arise.

Something like this might allow the conversion of badly damaged ships into Ds on boarding without being totally unfair to the player (critical fail on boarding = add the above flag rather than destroying it).
But unless there's some means to undo this kind of 'damage' or at least mitigate it somehow, it's just going to end up being be the same destroy-all-Ds but with more faff.

Which could be something along the lines of put this D ship in storage and tell it to repair, then you end up feeding it resources and money for x amount of time until it spits out a normal (or at least less degraded) version.

[Megas]

Perhaps another reason we have (D) ships, since many of them have the extremely crippling Degraded Engines hullmod, is the player can have some weak enemies he can catch even if he has slower ships.  I remember reading stories about people upgrading their fleet to a cruiser, then all of a sudden, smaller fleets run away and outspeed the player, and the only enemy fleets that would fight are the big armadas that would crush the player.

[Morrokain]

I've been toying with the idea of replacing (D) with a meter of "permanent structural damage" that ships slowly accrue every time they're badly beaten up and that causes gradually harsher penalties as it increases. It would make the strangely artificial (D) mechanic more organic, introduce wear-and-tear into the player's fleet and make taking a lot of damage but not dying have an actually meaningful downside.

Ideally I'd want a four-tier system of increasingly long-scale damage: CR, armor and hull (as it is now), structural damage (accrues slowly when taking lots of hull damage, can only be repaired at a drydock for a significant price in credits and time), permanent structural damage (accrues very slowly, no repairs, once it gets too high the hull goes to scrap). It would add some long-term dimension to fleet management and consequence to taking damage, as I hate how anything short of complete destruction can be immediately and completely fixed at any dock for a small sum of money in supplies. I suspect it would get instantly shot down as "too complex", though.

It isn't the complexity I do not care for so much as having my prized Astral I worked so hard for have a timer on it. If the game is as it should be, I am going to be taking damage at some point.

Could easily be fixed by having a not so easy repair at station way of reversing the damage though. Maybe similar to real world naval repairs. Like how lightly or moderately damaged ships can repair at any port, but heavily damaged ones require a drydock.

So maybe only major stations have a "drydock" equivalent and it takes way more money and a modest amount of in game time to repair this damage and the ship is not usable during that time.. hmm yeah I actually really like that idea.