Have played through two universes using this mod now, and there's a serious weighting issue with it.
I've read the feedback, and a lot of it is correct: the pay-off for going through all the loops to use the printed ship BPs simply doesn't have the content / depth to back up the mechanics of it. I understand the mechanics, so let's break this down:
A) You need to colonize at least three separate planets (which might be rubbish otherwise) and hold them
A.1) Assuming you're not save-scumming (assuming you're not playing IronMan), that means you might end up making / ditching five or so colonies to get a working Ship Forge etc
B) The mechanics are badly weighted and require huge resource investment
B.1) The drops are tied to loot tables that already hold the same BPs, meaning this mod reduces a player's chances of amazing BP / item drops .... for rubbish. Yes, I know this is somewhat offset by the unique event triggers, but it really isn't a 50/50 split at the moment
B.2) In my latest game I've found 6+ broken / blank tablets and I'm in early exploration game: about 20% explored. Serious question: do you really think anyone is going to ever use this method for six different ship BP types? No: so your loot table weighting is massively over-favouring your content to the detriment of player experience of the rest of the game.
B.3) This is ignoring the 10-12 ships required to sacrifice to get the thing working. For that amount of effort, a vanilla roll on a ship that already exists elswhere? Sorry, no: you're wasting my time.
C) You get nothing unique or extra-special from it after huge time sink / credit sink / investment -- these are essentially the same ships which you can get elsewhere, for much less effort. Yes, I can see the D-Mod angle. 9.51a has a skill that removes D-mods RNG as you fly around. So, kinda pointless all that juggling different cores then, wasn't it? Go look it up: find a BP, have a colony (that your mod requires multiple of), pay out $400,000 credits - bam, there's your endgame ship. Without.... the extra two colonies and multiple stages. And if you've a Pristine Forge, no D-mods.
D) Each of these takes 1 industry slot as an upgrade - meaning that it removes any chance of real function to the colony using it until mid game. If you parse it out, this is triple the investment since any colony with one that you might want to use when the ships might still be useful will not be producing anything else. It is crippling to use mid game since slots / growth is so mean anyhow.
@SirHartley - I get this mod: I get the mechanics: I get the effort and thought put into making the various bits work together. But it really doesn't work because you've not tied unique content / hulls / risk+reward together. At the very least, you need a unique set of Ancient Dominion ships that can only be made through this mechanic to justify it. At the moment, it's a great way to show off you know how to do mechanics - but it's terrible for a player using it. A very hacky but immediately required fix would be to force 2-4 Smods on any hull made in this manner -- and this still wouldn't justify the investment: the mod literally requires a player to only focus on this single aspect mid game for it to ever work, let alone pay off. Which it doesn't, all sane players will be abusing Marine raids for BPs.
p.s.
Having used the Rift Mechanic, you've an issue: I selected "move to colony" - it managed to target an Outpost. You need to hit up a <subtype> flag, outposts are really not colonies (and often never in places you want your planet to rift to).
Nice work coding / mechanics. Terrible to play so far.