Atm all ships are the same wherever you buy them.
How about some diversity, not exactly crafting but....allow players to change engines on their ships.

Something like this:

1. Corvus
With good corvus standing and adequate levels you can buy corvus enhanced engines for small to medium ships. Some engine variants require more space so cargo space on your ship or hull thickness is reduced but in return those engines give more thrust, speed, spin etc.

2. TPG
Good tpg standing and lvls gives you access to TPG enhanced engines for all ships and variants. TPG enhanced engines can have less power drain, can be lighter so your ship is slightly more manouverable.

3. ITANI/SERCO
Nation players only can get access to enhanced military grade engines. This kind of engines give faster acceleration, thrust, bigger top speed but installing them reduces your hull strength and cargo capacity.

4. UIT
Nation players only can get access to special trader grade engines. This kind of engines are lighter so your hull strenght and cargo space are improved.

5. HIVE
Some HIVE enhanced engines can be captured as bots drop them.

How to get access to new engines:

a.) mission trigerred
You have to do a special mission for faction/nation to get access to enhanced engines. There could be a few steps involved so ppl who finish advanced missions get access to even better or more specialised engines.

or

b.) faction standing and levels
You need adequate standing and levels to be able to buy enhanced engines.

Thats it for now. Feel free to comment or add your ideas.

And I vote no... The eason we have static engines is so things can be balanced. Balanced > unbalanced.

Sorry for trolling about your nickname, but in Russian internet slang "boyan" means "something discussed ages ago". Like the subject of changeable engines on this forum

Hmmm ..... when crafting is implemented we will be able to create only existing models of ships so we dont disturb allmighty balance of things?

my assumption is that this was or is an idea that the devs have/had on their table.

on the HUD there is a specific location of an icon for the engine, as well as the batt, and the port weapons. so whether the dev's are still planning to implement this idea, or have given up on it; that little icon still gives us hope of individual ship design.

balance is what is holding this game back. the more unbalance this game becomes, the more like life it becomes. and that's the key to a winning game concept. art immitating life.

More variety! I vote a big honkin yes. Variation balances itself. Hopefully economics will sort some of it out too. Meaning, you can build an uber setup, but only for very uber bucks/hard work.

AND, don't forget the weaight/mass ratios, AND, don't forget that one man's dream ship is another man's expanding cloud of shrapnel.

~D.
"Nigel"

..I realize this was discussed to death back in alpha when engine ports were first taken out, but I *really* liked using an efficient engine to turn any ship into an instabooster

Oh my. There was an engine slot back in Alpha, yes, but if I remember right, the Devs took it out in favor of ship variants.

Hmmmm...

An easier solution would be to offer ship variants with different engines, hull, weight, and cargo space. Also, you could get more variants by increasing your standing with certain factions.

My alternative needs to be implemented ASAP.

=P

thurisaz, that's exactly the point. If any ship can become an infinite turbo enabled one, the game becomes less interesting, less diverse.

Not to mention that running would become harder.

...mm, to a point; I forget the exact speed differential but I remember instaboost engines could only go 180m/s or so

..anyhow, I eagerly await incarnate's turbo revamping..

Oh right... they had lower top speed. But for running, the first few seconds usually decide if you can get away anyway. So my observation about running was pure and utter nonsense.

As for the game becoming less diverse with every ship being able to infiniboost, I still stand by that.

I must disagree Toshiro.
Im not so sure players would massively go for engines that enable infiniboost especially if a valkyre or svg with uber military engine and high drain can catch your infiniboosting ship in 2 secs.
There would be a lot of diversity and suspense because you will never know what kind of ship are you confronting.

No.
Simply, no.

There would be two types of engines used once you can get them: 'efficient' and 'heavy'; there would be no point in using a medium engine or a light one, and the free one would be right out.

Why not trust the devs on this?

how often do you use the medium batt, now that you can purchase the heavy and fast charge?

it's the same thing for engine choice... once you earn the higher engines; those will be the ones you choose to stay with. the tricky part is earning your engines.

i know we all have characters that we are proud of, and dont want to have to start from scratch, so i suggest these engine types are earned at lvl 10 and up. only those who work on their lvls will qualify for more choices. what category of license this would go under, is not up to me, so i will say 9/9/9/9/* -- 10/10/10/10/* -- blah, blah, blah...

break-down:
lvl <=9 (that's up to and including 9) -- standard free engine
lvl 10 -- light engine
lvl 11 -- medium engine
lvl 12 -- heavy engine
lvl 13 -- trade engine

this could posibly be the answer to two ideas. it puts a use to our licences past 9, and it put use to that little engine icon (p.s. it looks like a flashlight) in the HUD again.

[edit]and before anyone thinks that i would automatically qualify for the best engine, their wrong. 9/12/8/11/7... i dont even qualify for the light engine.

I don't like this. Why not keep it just the way it is now? It works.

We had to ditch the configurable engines, because it was actually starting to limit variability (strangely). Basically, engines that were too powerful, when coupled with ships that had too little mass, would result in destabilizing of the mouse-look control system. So I actually had to be very careful, when defining ships, to not stray out of those boundaries and keep everything usable everywhere. Some ships would destabilize from different distribution of mass, and so on, so it was a difficult thing to predict.

Anyway, this became a problem when we started expanding the diversity and types of ships, and it was more worthwhile to just have a custom engine specific to every ship variant. That way I could test the individual variants and be sure that yes, this ship works the way intended. I didn't then have to test the new ship with every engine, or add a new engine and test it with every ship, and so on (which becomes worse and worse as we add more ships).

The best-case solution is to eventually offer "modifications" which can be done to your existing ship, which are specific to that ship and have been individually tested ahead of time. So, for instance, you could purchase an "armor upgrade" or "engine upgrade", without actually buying and equipping a new engine. You could look at it like the station mechanics taking your existing engine and tweaking it to improve performance. That's the direction I would like to take further down the road. We're a little too busy with other stuff right now, but.. that's generally where we're headed.

...what's the status on http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/13242

is this still being considered?

Some variation thereof is still being considered (not necessarily what I posted, but something to serve that purpose), but not for a couple of months at least.