I have to agree, the midline one on top left does indeed look good. The lowtech(?) one feels closer to a Diable Avionics skin, though.
Personally, I've always noticed that there was a distinct lack of pirate variants for that faction. I guess it'd require a bit more editing than just color changes, but do you think that's feasible?
If it's making a midline skin pack or any other, I can properly edit it in an hour or two. I already made some skins just for myself,
but I absolutely will not release anything without the author's permission.As for the lack of pirate ships - it always made sense to me since SCY are quite protective and relatively isolationist, so where would the pirate template or modified hulls come from? Perhaps from scavenging from battles with SCY fleets? But then there would not be many for the ships to be commonly fielded by the pirates either way since SCY are a minor faction all things considered.
It's absolutely feasible, but the question rather from
'If' should be directed at
'Why?' and
'What for?'.
If I had to make pirate conversions I'd probably only stick to the freighters/tankers that were caught up in trading fleets and pirate raids, and make them quite uncommon.
Some ships are a bit unused so they could see new life in pirate hands.
Here's what I would do to make it worth my time:- I could see the captured Balius pattern converted into a missile boat with 6 hardpoint small missile mounts. Make it a rare but annoying and squishy bugger, fielding like 2 Slamanders, 2 permanently built-in Anti-missile pads (they really need a buff and you never see or want them), and 2 Arc missiles racks. Take away 3/4 of the cargo capacity and you have a mini Buffalo Mk.II.
- Balius tanker could have given 2 hardpoint medium missile mounts in the middle tanker spot with Pillums, perhaps even adding a new integrated hullmod just for it specifying that tiny fuel tanks on the front and back were integrated into the missile racks, giving the projectiles +25% speed boost and range due to extra fuel.
- Centaur, Telchine, and Megaera are rarely used even by players and you don't see much of them in the SCY fleets either - giving them Pirate Conversion hull mod and a paint makeover as well as replacing SCY weapons with the pirate ones would be enough, to make them slightly weaker you could add Ill-Advised Modifications hullmod (would fit perfectly with a pirate attempt at converting unfamiliar SCY engineering doctrine. Perhaps a lore flavor text that they've been captured by pirates on the trading fleet rides? Etc.
- In a similar fashion - I can see Xanthus easily converted into a fast-tinfoil armor-makeshift carrier with 3 bays on its left side. Would be easy to do - just paste a bay 3 times on top of the left containers. As an extra flavor to make it unique, you could give it one permanent drone slot, Ill-Advised Modifications and Converted Cargo Bay, take away 2/3 of cargo capacity and add Shielded Cargo Holds hullmod instead.
- If you want to go wild then make cheaper pirate Keto without the Big Gun or External Fighter Bays and add two large ballistic mounts where they would normally meet instead, probably also change the other large slot to . Drop the deployment cost by 10. Make it deploy regular drones instead. Give it Ground Support Package, Additional Berthing, and Pirate Modifications as integrated hullmods, perhaps Converted Cargo Bay. Now you have a dedicated 9-Burn speed raiding platform.
Overall not that much work aside from repainting and changing minor details with a few extra lines of code to justify their presence and make them distinct.
