First of all - thank you for the mod, a great complication of the game. Smuggling - sounds very interesting, and should encourage the player to lower the stability of worlds, or look for worlds with low stability to get some weapons / ships from the black market.
This led to some interesting gameplay changes - I started selling and throwing away weapons much less often - you never know what and when it will come in handy, and what and when you can find/buy it.
Much more often I began to think about recovering found ships in space. "This warship might not have been the best buy before, but now that there are no alternatives, it will do. "
There are potentially more interactions with pirates -- their bases are those rare sources of weapons and warships. Great!
Raids on stations and worlds for weapons have also become much more meaningful.
On the other hand there are a few tricky points
1. The Prism Port from Nex is still a legit place with the ability to buy not just weapons but rare and high quality weapons. I like Prism Port, it sells great ship modifications, but on the other hand it becomes one of the main places to buy quality ships for the fleet. One of the main if not the only one.
2. Selling weapons. It's forbidden and you can't buy weapons in the regular market, but you can sell them. This feels a little weird. Perhaps should add an interface similar to the interface with the transfer of AI cores to the administration of the station or planet? Perhaps a small monetary reward and a bit of reputation...
3. Small guns, at least to be able to protect a minimal ship. This is more about the ability to arm yourself minimally, to fight back the pirates. Following the logic - such strict regulation only encourages cooperation with the smugglers, perhaps add an intermediate arms market where the minimum reputation (0-10) player can buy a small gun? Nothing special, just a small machine gun per tanker... But then again, if we're talking about the strictest regulation, the mod does it right.
4. Not sure if this is implemented now - maybe should limit the sale of space marines? Limit it to pirate stations, and military markets. Maybe some stations (like Tri-Tah) can sell mercenaries.
It's great that the mod is now pushing to find characters in bars that can sell you a warship for a low price, maybe it would be worth developing this idea, and add something like "Contact" that would offer different ships at some periodicity? (Just like with the head rewards - three levels of difficulty, three monetary rewards. Three different ships in different price ranges (maybe more expensive than usual, maybe beaten up)
Oh, and the idea of slightly battered ships on sale looks great too. It makes the economics of the game a little more complex.
This mod in the mix with Rutheless sector, Second Wave really refreshes the game and makes it much more complex.