Hm... I'd rather be in favour of more ship variants that cater to specific needs in this department, rather than a general 'filter' being applied to the entire range of ships. The reason: If you in-/decrease something that is not as such a linear occurrence (how ships and weapons ports are balanced) by a linear factor, you may end up destabilizing more than you wanted. Suddenly, 'nerfed' ships can become 'uber'.

I am against this.

Mmm, good point...
/me reiterates what toshiro said.

How about a shipconfiguration where you are able to fit small port weapons on large, but, perhaps just limit the number of ports for rockets/missiles use.
You could either fit a ship with
2 large 1 small gun
or
3 small guns
or
2 large 1 missile
or
2 small 1 missile
or
2 missile 1 large

well, you get the point.

Will you tell all the new players every time they ask why this works and how? Here, KISS really applies. Make predefined variants, and let people buy them. Once crafting is implemented, we might get the option to change ports around as well, which would render this suggestion completely obsolete.

/me again reiterates what toshiro said.

Why would you let the players redesign the ships, and IF you let them, most likely it could get the way as proposed. Why not instead let the " crafting " which I would call "building", be more like, get the blueprint for some ship somehow and make adjustments to it somehow and build the crap and sell to whoever wants to buy it. That way you could start introducing factories, research and alot of other stuff, have a eceonmy in the game that leans towards "player run" economy, supply & demand.

Explain to me how that would be different from what I wrote in my post previous to this one. I said nothing about complete redesign, since it is not entirely clear yet how crafting is supposed to work out. Besides, I imagine it would be difficult to push the weight of the economy towards the players, even with substantial increases in playerbase size.

There's nothing wrong with customization.

I've played a lil bit of Eve recently, and I've got to say, the customization is one of the nicest things. (the autopilot is the nicest thing)

The difference is, they have multiple ways of balancing. Being CPU, power grid, number of ports, type of ports. And in addition there's the price and the mass to consider.

Look. balance isn't easy, but hell, that's what makes a good game.

Look at Magic the gathering, they manage to balance hundreds of cards against eachother, they have a system for doing it, and there's no reason to believe that the devs can't come up with a system of balance of their own, and then fit everything to it.

otherwise, you're always going to be balancing things against what already exists, rather than balancing it against what is the ideal situation.

So....

why not have a port adapter, as long as you have the vision to know exactly where that fits into the scheme, seems like there should be no problem

I'm not against customization, on the contrary. I am, however, against catering to single ideas at a time if they can be fit directly into larger pictures, against an 'I want this, right here, right now' mentality.

All I'm saying is that maybe it could wait until crafting is being implemented, so that it can be implemented in a reasonably large update (both in terms of absolute amount of change and its possible ramifications), and be balanced in parallel to, or even integrally as part of, the crafting system. It would reduce the overall workload, I'm sure, since you wouldn't have to first introduce the port adapter, then balance the problems arising from that change against what's there, and then introduce crafting, which might render the port adapter obsolete and balance the situation that may have significantly changed against that.

What I see is this suggestion getting bigger and bigger and blowing out. Could we just see something nice and simple like a large port being able to accept either a large or small item?
That would take minimal code change and would answer about half the enquiries. Logically, there isnt any reason why you couldn't bolt a smaller weapon into a heavy port, but a small port (even if you combine 2 of them) wouldn't have the structural strength to handle the power etc of a heavy weapon, not to mention as mentioned earlier, the port may be on opposite wings of the ship.

So nice and simple, could we get it set so that a large port can accept a small OR large item.

Please..... *sweet smile*

'tika

/me shudders at the though of facing a tri-flare Prom.

I really don't know what to think about this. One the one hand it would make perfect sence... on the other it could make life a bit complicated.

uh .. like 2xflare + jack?

Shhhh, you'll wake Spider up.

o.O

ZOMG! Three rockets on a Prom!

/me goes to copy

What Kontika said - only let large ports accept both types of equipment.