Wow, isnt that from Starcraft?
Yes it is, the wireframe from the dropship to be precise. I like it because it splits up the ship into several segments, which could be done with armor for when it's damaged or not as it's likely that they're alreayd split up into segments, just that they're undefined.
Real quick note: press and hold 'C'.
Whoops, that's a case of bad reading on my part. I made some of those mistakes on my OP so feel free to disregard them if they're wrong.
this has been discussed to a great extend, it's really hard to justify universal slots, especially bigger ones...
story wise (in terms of different era's not having acces to certain technology)
balance wise (cookie cutter... the flak weapons are the best PD you can get, the antimatter has the highest burst etc.)
it actually takes variety from the game, if you are not forced to do otherwise you will start to only use your favorite 1 or 2 weapons, also the ships start to feel less unique...
how much it actually makes sense...
one of the mods has a frigate with 4 small universal slots in it...
i noticed that this doesn't really add anything, you are more or less forced to use certain weapons anyways
4 energy weapons doesn't make sense at all, they cost waaay too much flux to be viable
4 ballistic weapons might be, but why would you? you could take the lasher and have 5 + 2 missiles
2 weapons and 2 missiles seems legit but it's basically what other ships offer aswell
4 missiles runs out of steam too fast
combining energy and ballistic weapons doesn't make too much sense
it's really hard to justify something like that in the actual game... this would require a frigate with a large mount... how do you balance that?
you would need to create a ship that has a large energy mount but it wouldn't have anything else...
it would be incredible weak against... anything that comes close to it (because the only energy weapons a frigate could support with it's weak flux values would be the long range support type of weapons and the autopulse cannon... and even the autopulse generates quite some flux and isn't even really good on it's own)
however, if you want it... there's a mod that has it
i think it's starfarer extended which features a frigate with a large mount
the energy one is kinda not fun, but the one with the large ballistic mount is quite good (actually quite OP
)
i think my main question would be...
y do you want and/or need something like that?
i don't really see a use for it...
well, i would guess that you are not supposed to have a lot of elite crew and that in the real game it will be hard to get enough elite crew for more than 1 or 2 ships...
i bet you only have that much because you are camping the spawn for ages ...
Speaking of maneuvering, try to make your ship come to a complete halt with absolutely no drift at all. You'll find this is very hard, but the computer does it all the time.
nothing more easy than that... press and hold C
i think that alex has said something like "the AI also takes into account which ship could be the first to arrive at the target"
also different objectives have different priorities... that's probably which does the switching...
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Well this is modifying, why not allow you to 'upgrade' slots to larger or change what type they are? Same with the OP, why can't we pay money to expand it a little bit. One issue I will note that really should be fixed is that sometimes turrets have really restrictive firing arcs which destroys a lot of customizability due to the turret's inflexability. You can also add an omni shield emitter to a ship without any shields at all, which is rather counter-intuitive.
Uniqueness does have something to do with it, however I doubt you could upgrade your entire fleet like I suggest without effectively having completed the campaign anyway. There's also no real issue of it appearing in Missions as you're forced to use whatever variant they give you. However if there are already weapons that are undoubtedly 'better' than people are going to use them as often as they can anyway, so the uniqueness doesn't really seem to justify to me as a reason not to do it because you already sort of can, it's just heavily restricted. If anything that means that weapon balance needs to be worked on more than anything as if there's a weapons that is just 'better' than anything else at the same rank than either other weapons are too weak, or that weapon is too strong.
As for variation, why not two pulse/burst lasers, two PDs, and add more flux vents? What about two ion cannons and two PD's as a ship designed to take down shields with high reliability. Etc.
On the topic of a Tachyon Lance on a frigate, if you're willing to put a 25,000$ gun on a 8000$ ship than all the more power to you. It's an end-game weapon (currently anyway) so at that point why not?

Any idea how much armor I lost?
Also, I'm aware of the priorities, however they are assigned pretty randomly. I can have a ship right next to a place I want defended, then if I change it to assault the ship will move away while another ship half way across the map will take it's place. That's the problem I have.