I dont know if this has been suggested before (probably) but im gonna suggest it anyways.
If you have a craft with 2 small ports would it be possible for a station to fit a 'port adapter' which would bridge the 2 small ports to create 1 large port. Or possibly the other way round, 1 large = 2 small
This would probably invalidate your ships warranty so would have to be done in 'grey space' or at some back street ship dealer.
Suggested design of port adapter --- Y
Ok so it looks like a forked stick but you get the idea.

I love this concept!

PS: I was just about to suggest [something] like this myself :D -booster pylons that take up 2+ CU but give a helluva lot more turbo.. they run out tho, and can be jettisoned like real life fighter fuelpods.

It would lead to a bit more variation in ship abilities EG: Axia bus (yes it has 2 small ports) but with an advanced gatling turret!! Suprise!!

It might be possible to get the ships to go faster if certain 'safety' items were removed, such as the heavy plating round the engine bay or some of the armour. This would of course lead to a lighter faster ship but is not without some dangers, i would be ideal for couriers though not very good for combat.

Mmm, I actually don't think this is a good idea. It may actually lead to less ship variation. For example, if you could mount a large port on a Valkyrie, you would have a super agile ship with 1s port and 1l port. Why then would anyone want to fly the Warthog?

Good point. The forked stick would have to be quite substantial and thus would be quite heavy. This would in turn lead to a performance decrease.
Perhaps it would have to take up some cargo space too, this would mean on ships with little cargo space it would be a trade off.

Just a thought but the Warthog is available at lvl 3 / 4 and the Valk isnt available until lvl 8, thats quite a skill gap.
Carrying on with the theme, why not make it possbile that you could substitute a cargo-port adapter for a weapon slot so that the pure cargo haulers can have a bigger cargo capacity. Something like 2 cu for a small slot and 6 for a large slot.

The adaptor idea is a good one. I wouldnt want to be able to combine 2 Small ports to get a large one (how would that work on the vulture, the ports are on the wingtips?), But possibly having a Large port be able to carry a Small port weapon would be nice. There are times when i'd like to put a second gauss cannon on my warthog.

Having Cargo Modules attached to the Weapons ports would also be useful.

You know what would be neat, a turret adapter!
You put any small weapon on the turret that plugs into a large port and it increases the autoaim.

/me imagines a tach III with agt's autoaim.

Well maybe not that good, then again you could just make it weigh a ton to "balance" it out. :P

What if you got rid of the idea having a certian amount of ports per ship. Every ship could get a slot rating instead. If you want an extra battery on you ship, put a battery port on and then buy a battery to go into the port. If you want a weapon that goes on a large port, then you buy a large port and then buy a weapon to go in that port. This could also be applied for future idea like cloaks or lock-on jammers. Every type of feater would have its own type of port. Lower quality features like bad stealth or a bad lock-on jammer would a have a port that takes up less slots then advance stealth or advance lock-on jammers. Every type of port takes up a different number of slots. Also you could sell ports that certain faction make and only sell to people with high standings with them. Like a port that uses less slots then it would normally use.

This would cause heavily armed ships to not have alot of features and not so heavily armed ships to have a few trick up their sleeves.

Also, medium ports could be added so average and power weapons don't have the same type of ports.

-- What if you got rid of the idea having a certian amount of ports per ship. Every ship could get a slot rating instead. --

Because this idea eliminates the differences between the ships.

The hulls are designed to have a certain function. The current slot system is pretty good, but being able to adapt the ports just a bit would help add some diversity without eliminating the reasons to have different hulls.

Ok so we scrap the idea of the forked (Y) stick and replace it with a (n) shaped adapter that fits into a large slot and allows you to fit a small wepaon in. Just like sticking the beer mat under the table leg.
I like the idea of a med slot, this would have to be reserved for special items like the mentioned jammers or chaff / flare launchers.
Stealth has been mentioned a lot and had frequently been dismissed as a good but not really workable idea.

This is probably among top 10 suggestions of all time.

If you think it through, too much customization turns out to be bad. Any simplistic approach to it you might take leads to imbalances, and a complex approach basically involves having some sort of ship engineering system (think building a mech in Btech). But of course, this has the problem that the devs have to have a model for any sort of ship that one might want to build!

Conversely, too little customization is also bad.

As far as ports go, a 'cargo pod' attachment which fills a weapon slot and adds more cargo is probably a good idea. I wouldn't think it would be that hard to code, and it's hard to unbalance the game that way. On the other hand, a 'weapon pod' attachment which turned cargo into weapons (as some have suggested in the past) is probably not a good idea. Ships with lots of cargo just weren't designed to get a huge combat advantage out of that. Think what it would do for the Pizza Cutter.

I agree more types of ports is a good idea. It's been one of my longest standing requests, but of course each gizmo involves its own peice of code so I don't expect it soon.

"Stealth has been mentioned a lot and had frequently been
dismissed as a good but not really workable idea."

It has? I must have missed that conversation. Point me to the thread.

Ummm cant really remember any exact threads but it most certainly has been mentioned with all the usual for and against arguments, power drain - no turbo - pirates with cloaks killing all and sundry etc etc.
I must admit i like the idea of stealth / cloaking but it would have to be limited to crourier and cargo ships. It would be just toooooo tempting otherwise.

How about the ability to hybridise some large port weapons with small port weapons?

Say, you have an advanced gatling turret and a tach mkII. Take it to a hi-tech station and you might get an autoaim slightly better than a gauss on your tach, or have the gatling fire green bolts with no spread, slower fire, and slightly more damage.

Or a gemini plugged into a swarm launcher, making an uber-heavy 40-holding gemini launcher. Nice for those long, drawn out battles... How about a jackhammer/firefly hybrid- jackhammers that *slightly* swerve towards their target but need the momentum of your ship to determine their speed.

Mission-obtained weapons perhaps? >.>

Ello UncleDave long time no see.
I wasnt thinking of anything quite as complex as modifying or mixing and matching weapons.

can you imagine a flare/jackammer valk? eep.

Or a Maud even. But now that weapons have mass the flares have been nerffed a bit, so i'm informed anyways.

Ok, this is an interesting thread, what happened ? Are you able to fit small port weapons onto large ports ? Don't think the game would get imbalanced that way, there are other games that have adapted this method successfully.

Yarrr,

Ragnarok + 7 Sunflares!

Orion Hornet Convoy Guardian + 2 Megaposi