- Sindria developed Solar Shielding.
- Sindria (with TT help) developed Kinetic Blaster and G I G A C A N N O N.
- Sindria-exclusive ships are straight worse than base.
- Luddic Path ships get SO for free when nobody else can.
One of these things doesn't hold up.
(You're right, #4 is factually incorrect As to the implied contradiction between these items, I honestly just don't buy it; imo you don't even have to try hard to have it all make sense in-fiction.)
No, it's correct. LP ships have built-in SO, which can't be built-in anymore. It also doesn't take up a story point built-in slot. You can find their blueprints and build them yourself, and after restoration they're straight up better at being SO ships than the same hull in non-LP form. Religious nutters who hate technology have better engineers than a dictator who fetishizes high technology. Lions Guard ships have been designed with no redeeming qualities compared to the base hull, whereas LP ships have an obvious and very large redeeming quality.
A fair complaint might be that the player can do stuff the Sindarian Diktat can't, but I don't think the comparison to Luddic Path engineers is right in your example. As mentioned by CoveredInBees, it's the player's restoration that allows SO to be retained on the ships without a downside. So the player is a genius engineer, or they hired one, not the Luddic Path engineers that are amazing. Even the player's faction isn't that good, as every LP ship they build still has ill-advised modifications. Only the player's personal fleet can have them. And in general, I consider Ill-advised modification to be such a downside, I'd never seriously use a ship with it in my fleet.
If we're concerned about game balance, it gets a shrug from me. Luddic Path ships with built in SO include the Brawler, Cerberus, Gremlin, Hound, Kit and Lasher. All frigates, and most of them simply not that impressive in a combat context (SO Hound is out of combat amazing in a pacifist play through). I don't see typical end game fleets packed with Brawlers and Lashers for example, compared to frigates like Hyperions, Scarabs, and Omens. And the others are just civilian ships that get bumped up to the "I might consider them in combat" tier after restoration.
Where as ships like the Hammerhead, and sounds like Sunder, don't necessarily need a stronger skin version to make them threatening. Eagle and Falcon perhaps might, but mostly from an offensive perspective - defensively they're fine, but you can't really get their front ballistics and mid-energy to work very well together into a strong DPS setup. And they've already got XIVth Battlegroup skins anyways. It'll be interesting to see if the new medium energy weapons help those mid-line cruisers.
Point being: If there were say a hullmod that could only be installed on Lion's Guard ships that flips their uniqueness from negative to positive(Say gives them a smattering of tiny little buffs roughly equivalent to what could otherwise be achieved with the OP cost of Solar Shielding) justified by the ingenuity of the standard Diktat grunt having to deal with egotistical inefficiencies forced upon them, given as a quest reward then the players could perhaps have their cake and eat it too.
Hmm, it's an interesting idea. Feels like a lot of work - as you say - without too much reason for it, though. Like, if we really, really wanted to make the LG ships "not a downgrade" there's probably simpler ways - and I probably wouldn't want to go down the route of enabling that through some kind of *Diktat* mission line... hmm.
Simplest change to make it not a straight downgrade would be to change Solar Shielding from built in at cost, to simply applied to every auto-build and variant the Lion Guard uses, and set OP back to standard. So after a restore, you've got a baseline ship with a cool paint job. Which may not be the way you want to go, but it certainly strikes me as the simplest from a coding perspective. It's also consistent with the baseline Diktat fleet presumably fielding standard versions of the ships which don't have the downsides.
Actually, thinking about it further, if special modifications is mostly cosmetic, it would technically make LG ships buffed with the Derelict Operations skill, and neutral otherwise when restored, as compared to baseline ships.
Although even that much probably doesn't help with players perceptions which have been built up over the years of thinking of the Lion's Guard as elite, instead of a parade and ego-boosting force.