I suggest that Engine upgrades become available to purchase. For example, Each ship as stock engines, but You can puchase new ones for specific ships that improve your turbo speed and energy rates as well as your maximum m/s and energy usage. Perhaps some sort of vertical speed and horizontal speed improvements or upgrades as well.

Thanks.

This has been mentioned before but, that does not make it any less a great idea.

+1

I can imagine spending as much time upgrading my ship as I do my vehicle in Forza 3... but hey, as long as you can save the sets, let's do it.

Of course, there'll be much bickering regarding what the upgrades are and how much they cost and how they are balanced... but configurability is good.

I dont think we need more ship upgrades to go along with all the variants.

+1
Diversity is allways good

Maybe few engines selection, as example:

Fast) Great turbo thrust, small spin torque
Combat) Small turbo thrust, big spin torque

So it adds another layer of personalization.

Actually, we used to be able to equip engines and batteries separately. The devs chose to lock each ship type to a specific engine.

I'm sure if you search through the forums, you'll find something explaining the change.

I can corroborate igrok's memories, and as far as I can recall, the reasons were that you basically had infiniboost Valks, Proms, Cents... It actually reduced ship choices, not increased diversity.

If we do engine upgrades again (which we may), it will be per-ship. Not generic engines that can be applied to anything. We ran into serious limitations with the control system destabilizing when certain physics parameters were used with too light of a mass. That made for limitations on what ships could be made (the Superlight, for instance, would have been impossible).

The idea sounds good to me, and it would make racing more interesting too (think of the engineering competitiveness that goes into formula 1 racing). I digress. However, perhaps there should be (due to the issues incarnate pointed out) a point where putting a huge engine on a 'plywood' chassis just makes the ship tear itself apart. Discovering where those limits lie could be a challenge in itself. The same for weapons - there's a scene I remember from Deep Space 9 , when Sisko introduces the Defiant to his staff, and says that the weapons were so powerful that they had issues with the ship tearing itself apart. I just liked that image, but maybe that's just me... I'll shut up now.