- I would like to incorporate modded factions, but (to make perfectly clear) I will not do so without explicit permission and input from the mod author. This is to allow them the chance to set a blacklist of their choosing for what equipment they would like not to be replicable, or indeed whether they wish to be party to the mod in the first place.
As for how it's imbalanced without a whitelist, consider instead the following example: someone acquires a unique, high performance mod cruiser, or perhaps just something that's supposed to be acquired by upgrading a regular ship rather than constructed from scratch. They save, then feed it into the deconstructor; if they get the blueprint, then they now have an infinite supply of that cruiser. If they don't, they reload and try again. In terms of actual effect, this basically -is- omnifactory; once you've got a blueprint, you can acquire as many ships as you have cash to purchase and time to wait for - that's exactly what you could do with the old omnifactory.
This is... the entire point of the whitelist (or blacklist, if you're a glass half-empty person). Mod creator [Guy] says "Hey, I want the player to be able to reverse-engineer X, Y, and Z 'normal' ships, but NOT [super ship]!" And I'll be like "Okay, [Guy], I will set it up that way. [super ship] will not be blueprint-able!" You mention savescumming, but frankly if that's your contention, I'm not sure I track how that differs from any other similar abuse... or
using the console or something to add the BP, or hell, the ship. Sure, this can be abused... just like anything else.
I mean, I just am not sure how this is 'imbalanced' when all I'm doing is offering a method through which you can try to acquire BPs within the confines of investment in the gameplay itself. You have to invest the time, money, and resources to accomplish this goal.
With regards to just throwing money at the problem... I mean, yes, you're right, you can buy up and throw dozens of Whatever-Class Battleships at the DBE, and theoretically still fail to reproduce the BP because non-guaranteed possibility. But every single time you have to buy a new one to 'analyze'... why didn't you just stick it in your Stockpile or Fleet and just use the damn thing? If you similarly stock up hundreds of Pewpew-Class weapon to hedge your bets... you might as well just not use the DBE at all because you have plenty of Pewpews to use.
If anything, the main accomplishment here is it lets your own faction's fleets use the specific ships or weapons you want, or allow you to reproduce a specific ship you like if you fail to recover it after a big battle. Or maybe you really want [sicknasty frigate from that mod you like] filling up your small combatant slots, but don't want to have to sit at the market of the faction to buy it up every time it shows up.
I only see this being practically usable by a player who's already in a roflstomp murderfleet anyways, and just wants to be able to specifically have 3 or 4 of X destroyer for the sake of faction/thematic consistency, but also already killed off that faction from the game and doesn't want to go running around surveying for it.
That... doesn't make any sense to me. If the goal is to get blueprints from a destroyed faction, where are you going to get the ships to deconstruct?
High-End Seller (Which up-prices everything anyways)? Random seeding in other fleets (which is at the faction's author, granted, but still possible)? Maybe you already have one of their [neat destroyer] that you looted during their last stand, you think "hmmm... I think I'll take my chances on being able to replicate this..." and stick it in the DBE. Which, as I have iterated multiple times, is not a sure-fire method, so now you have to ask yourself -- do I like this destroyer so much that I'll roll the dice on being able to reproduce it? Or do I keep it as the last legacy of [faction] in the Sector?" And see above re: savescumming, I don't really acknowledge that as a valid criticism because you can savescum for a lot of stuff in this game (accidentally engaged the wrong fleet? Wanna retry that failed 55% force balance market invasion? Try that raid again to see if you get better stuff? Etc.)
...Come to think of it, there's also a potential conflict with Nexerelin: that mod adds a "blueprint trader", the limitations of which break down if the player can just manufacture blueprints of ships they've already got.
I'm not sure I'm following your logic here. The BP trader has a random smorgasbord of all sorts of stuff. If they have a BP for [cool cruiser] of [faction X], who you haven't even encountered in-game yet (whether on allied terms or as an enemy), you can buy it...
Unless (and I acknowledge this to be a large issue) you meant to point out that you could throw a bunch of relatively-high-chance blue-printable items into the DBE, then just offload them at the BP trader for relatively risk-free points. Was... this what you were saying and I didn't quite understand? Between this and (if I did it that way) not having mod-author-specified whitelists, these are really the only issues I see. The latter is, well, solved by whitelisting, and the former... okay, yeah, that one's a roadblock.
But frankly speaking, I really see no balance issues here, because if you have the money to afford examples to prototype, you have the money to buy them and just deploy them in the first place. If you get lucky and roll the BP the first time, cool, you still need the manufacturing overhead to produce it, and what makes [mod-added general purpose cruiser] so much better than an Eagle or something? If [mod-added cruiser] is so much better that getting its BP and being able to reproduce it wildly imbalances the game, then that is the faction author's issue, not mine.
Since you won't be able to reproduce some Arcade-mode super ship or upgraded IBB version or whatever because of the whitelisting (unless the author specifies they want it, which... I mean, whatever, their call), the only thing you'll be manufacturing is one of their 'standard' warships.