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[Deshara]

.

[Yunru]

To what end?
Would it no longer cost OP?
Would it have reduced flux generation?
Does it get a procedurally generated hood ornament?

[Deshara]

no OP, cant be lost if it blows up. sometimes theres a gun you really want on ur build that you jjjjjjuuust can't fit in even by building in hullmods & the ability to use a story point to squeak it in would be nice.

[Megas]

This is possibly overpowered for smaller ships with oversized mounts, maybe as much or more so than Safety Overrides.  In case of smaller ships, integrating high OP weapons (like a 10+ OP medium weapon on a Wolf or Brawler, or 30 OP plasma cannon on Sunder) would save much more OP than a hullmod.

[Deshara]

yep.
i dont think "frigates are overpowered" is a big problem in the game rn

[Yunru]

But then you'd be able to make crazy stuff like Storm Needler Mudskipper Mk.II and have it potentially work...
...
I kinda want to see that.

[intrinsic_parity]

I think to be balanced, it would need to take the same slots as built in hull mods, or at least interact with that mechanic in some way. Otherwise ships with built in hull mods and weapons would have insane amounts of free OP.

[Thaago]

There's also the issue that, unlike hullmods, the amount of free OP given by this would be mount size dependent. An eagle could get a maximum of 15 free OP (Heavy Needler), while an Apogee or Champion or even Sunder could get 30 (Plasma).

[Marco]

I think to be balanced, it would need to take the same slots as built in hull mods, or at least interact with that mechanic in some way. Otherwise ships with built in hull mods and weapons would have insane amounts of free OP.

To be fair, weapons have a limited number of slots on a hull to begin with, especially the bigger ones. By building in a weapon, you're removing a slot from the ship permanently. For balance, I'd just allow one built in weapon per hull tho.

[KDR_11k]

I don't really like it. One factor is that since you need to find the weapons first you'll likely want to wait a while before you start building things in just to get the good guns you'd actually want to keep, then there's the further screwing with the OP balance (it's already awkward that s-mods strongly favor expensive mods), more SP cost for a fully decked out ship, less build flexibility unless you go for built-ins that work in almost any build, etc. It also favors ships with fewer, larger mounts over ones with more smaller mounts.

It might be interesting if it gave you something you couldn't get without building in, either some weapons you can't have otherwise, some ability to mess with the weapon mounts (converting one to a different type or size, for example) or just bonuses to the specific weapon (or ideally some behavior changes). More OP refunds seem lame.

[Deshara]

There's also the issue that, unlike hullmods, the amount of free OP given by this would be mount size dependent. An eagle could get a maximum of 15 free OP (Heavy Needler), while an Apogee or Champion or even Sunder could get 30 (Plasma).

people are already only building in the most OP-costing hullmods which, let me check here, goes up to 15 on a frigate, which u start the game with & dont even need to look for & source for each one you mount. Whereas the highest OP weapon a frigate can fit on almost any slot its gonna get (small universal) is the antimatter blaster at 9, or even a medium universal for the, like, 2 frigates that get any mediums is the heavy needler at 15 (which AFAIA no frigate actually has the flux stats to use without completely specializing itself into close support & being very vulnerable to anything that can keep up with it which is all other frigates). There's no way to argue that this change would actually seriously change the OP considerations for frigates. And going up in size from a frigate makes the OP gains from building in a weapon worse, since the OP cost of hullmods goes up but weapons dont. On a destroyer, the most OP expensive energy & missile weapon tie out with hardened shields, and one of those is the proximity charge point defense launcher and the other is the single most flux-expensive medium gun in the game, so unless you already wanted to use the heavy blaster you're better off building in hardened shields if nothing else, for OP considerations. Granted the heavy needler actually beats out everything but SO, so one out of the thus-far 8 use-cases for this is either a side- or down-grade. It does not get better from here. Your example of a ship that would be broken by this change, the most expensive gun it can sling is tied with or beaten out by 24 different hullmods. Even the single highest OP non-redacted gun in the game is 15 OP less than SO on a cruiser. On a capital ship its 20.
There is just no argument that this change would even affect the game's balance, except for the mudskipper. & at that point we've entered the realm of madness & honestly the mudskipper probably should be allowed to have its gun for free
(PS, it bares mentioning that I was assuming in my OP that it was a given that you wouldnt be allowed to build in infinite guns & theyd count for the 2-3 buildin limit)

I don't really like it. One factor is that since you need to find the weapons first

you also cant build in hullmods until you find them & theyre rarer

[SCC]

people are already only building in the most OP-costing hullmods which, let me check here, goes up to 15 on a frigate

You can't build SO in anymore. Operation Centre is more expensive than it at 30 OP and can be built in, but I doubt anyone would build it in on more than a single ship. Besides those, there's ECM Package and Nav Relay at 10 OP, High-res Sensors at 9, Heavy Armour and Expanded Missile Racks both at 8.
Though it doesn't really matter for your point, since most expensive hullmods and most expensive weapons are typically tied, except for some outliers (all frigates with mediums, Sunder, Apogee).

(which AFAIA no frigate actually has the flux stats to use without completely specializing itself into close support & being very vulnerable to anything that can keep up with it which is all other frigates)

Say hello to Brawler!

[Thaago]

I find it incredibly difficult to read just a single block of text with no line breaks but lots of you wrote is just incorrect. There are frigates with medium guns (and one large, though thats a pirate unshielded pinata ship so fine) and destroyers with Large. I gave the Sunder as an example in my previous post: hardened shields costs 12 OP. Plasma Cannon costs 30, Tachyon Lance 25. Even a cruiser with a large and the gun OP costs are higher than the expensive hullmods (heavy armor is 20).

There is also the point that currently building in hullmods still has the guns and flux stats (and importantly SO) competing for OP. There are a bunch of builds that would love to have only 1 or 2 built in hullmods and the rest be guns and flux stats. For SO builds in particular they don't want more hullmods, they want more guns/flux stats (and when SO was free it was just insane as the OP squeeze is an essential part of that hullmod's balance). Letting guns be built in removes that.

Practically speaking what this would do is introduce another filter of 'pick the highest OP thing to make free', only without the restrictions of requiring them to be hullmods. Every ship with an oversized weapon for its class (Wolf, Brawler, Hyperion, Tempest, Sunder, new lowtech ship, Apogee, Champion, Dominator, Gryphon I think? Maybe a few more?) gets an effective OP boost compared to others in their class. Medium ballistic ships get more OP out of this than medium energy ships. It would be a balance mess.

[intrinsic_parity]

I think to be balanced, it would need to take the same slots as built in hull mods, or at least interact with that mechanic in some way. Otherwise ships with built in hull mods and weapons would have insane amounts of free OP.

To be fair, weapons have a limited number of slots on a hull to begin with, especially the bigger ones. By building in a weapon, you're removing a slot from the ship permanently. For balance, I'd just allow one built in weapon per hull tho.

You're not removing the slot, there's still a useable weapon. It limits your loadout options, but the loadouts you can make are significantly stronger.

In terms of OP that, pretty close to giving ships an extra built-in hullmod (could be better on a lot of ships), which is way too strong to be given out for free IMO. Like you're talking ~50% more OP on most ships when built in hullmods and one built in weapon are stacked. The 'average' OP cost of a hullmod by ship size is 5/10/15/25, so I would say the ability to build in 1 weapon is something like 1-1.5x the OP value of the skill that lets you build in one hullmod (a tier 5 skill)....

an example: scarab has 60 base OP
expanded missile racks (8 OP) + hardened shields (6 OP) + hardened subsystems (5 OP) + am blaster (9 OP) is 28 extra OP and those are all part of my standard scarab build (I'm not doing anything to try and inflate numbers). Even if you swtich EMR out for a general 5 OP hullmod, you still get 25 bonus OP on a 60 OP ship....

This ability would be a very strong skill, not a convenience to be given out for free. I think ships with all built-in's stacked would be too strong compared to normal ships too. It would make so many fights trivial if your fleets has ~50% extra OP.

[KDR_11k]

I really don't see how this would make the game more interesting. Even if it's a trade for an s-mod slot all you're doing is give the player a bit more OP in cases where they have a weapon that costs more than their most expensive hullmod when they're looking to build something in. And if you weren't going to even have 2-3 hullmods in a build then you just allowed the player to make slightly more boring builds.

you also cant build in hullmods until you find them & theyre rarer

In my experience it doesn't take very long to build a full library of hullmods though, I usually have all of those before I have most of the large weapons since you can get Hullmod BPs from random garbage pirates while the higher quality weapons only come from enemies that put up an actual fight.