Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How about player assembled ships made from wrecks ?

Purposes:
- bring new exciting profession to EvE
- bring a new wind to both - missioning and PvP, especially PvP - you never know what abilities has ship you are facing in combat. Actual situation when you see 3 Harbi and 3 Drakes are quiet boring. You know in 90% what will happen.
- bring thousands new ships to EvE, sometimes so unique, sometimes so great that can be called "legendary"
- flying that ships will bring a new life for old, bored pilots, there will be something new and fresh
- economy will be a bit stimulated - there will come some concurency between producing rigs or junkships, there will be increased demand for minerals
- new profitable industry
- young pilots will fly mostly T1 ships untill they get necessary skills to pilot junkships.
However this is not short process. It will require at least 2 racial ships maxed (frigs or cruisers, etc.).
- new ships will open a path for pilots skilled i.e in missiles to good armour tanked ships. Just imagine other combinations possible
- EvE world will never be the same. You will never know what your opponent can do to you.

1. New ships like Tech 3 but assembled permanently. Hulls and subsystems are recovered from wrecks and repaired on station or POS in aprioprate ship assembly unit. Repair requires some materials but just plain minerals mined in the universe.
To build a junkship one will need 1 hull, 1 of each subsystem type and some additional materials.
At the end - ship assembly is an investment without predicted result. Final result will depend on RNG - how much of subsystem bonuses will retain 0-110%, how many slots -2 - +1, how many of them are weapon mounts -2 up to all high, how big capacitior and PG 75-110% same about cap and shield recharge, speed and agility.
Total number of slots will follow rules existing in eve to not create monsters like 20 slot frigate.
One can build mega-machariel other one can build cripled, slow, untanky and with tiny PG BS.
In a result there could be built fly very, very few uberships, some good ships, a lot of average ships, some bad ships and few not worthy undocking.
There could be possible using 1 oversized subsystem (i.e. cruiser size offensive with 4 frigate sized others and hull) but it will require more materials, higher skills and success chance can be lower.

2. Assembling junkships will require apropriate skills.
I.e. if ship is a frigate assembled from 2 caldari subsystems, 1 amarr and 2 gallente then required skills are:
Frigate construction 5, Caldari Starship Engineering 3, Amarr Starship Engineering 3 and Gallente Starship Engineering 3.
for "mixing" with oversized subsystem all those skills at 5.

3. New "proffesion" like salvaging but gathering whole wrecks. Recovered ship wrecks are big.
Size depends on class. I.e. frigate is 500m3, destroyer is 1000m3, cruiser is 1500m3, BC is 2500m3 and BS is 5000m3.
This means that there will be not so many ships efficiently gathering junks from battlefield and in some cases it will be risky.
Mostly ships used for that proffesion will be T1 industrials (or T2 in low/null/WH to minimize risk).

4. On station or POS wreck can be analyzed and then pilot discovers what subsystem was salvaged.
Junk analysis can also discover hull with some basic statistics but requiring 5 subsystems. Just like Tech 3 ships.
Subsystem stats are unknown untill all 5 are assembled into hull.
Using hull and 5 subsystems from same type ship (i.e. all parts taken from 6 Merlins) should assembly exactly Merlin :).
More - if all parts are from ship produced by one race (i.e. Caldari) a standard Caldari ship will be built. To create junkship at least 1 part must be from other race.

5. Piloting junkyard built ship requires maxed to 5 skill for that type of ship in each faction which subsystems were used to built one.
I.e. if ship is a frigate assembled from 2 caldari subsystems, 1 amarr and 2 gallente then required skills are:
Caldari Frigates 5, Amarr Frigates 5 and Gallente Frigates 5.
For destroyers and BC apropriate lower racial skills are required together with destroyers or BC maxed to 5.

6. Graphical representation at first look it should be hull of the wreck hull used to built a ship and some "attachments" modyfing external look to represent subsystems. This should be easiest to implement.

What do you think ladies and gentlemen about that idea ?

Cheers,

I'd have to say 'no' to this idea even though it would be friggin sweet. "Why" you might ask? Because CCP has limited themselves on how big Eve will get on your hard disk and we are operating close to capacity. What you are asking is to add in megabytes of information for stuff that would only get used by well-skilled players and may even get abused to the misfortune of players who will not get the chance to fly the epic doom phillus that some 2003 pilot managed to put together.

I really like this concept of spaceship alchemy...

Mashing invention and T3 production together could be interesting. There are a few things that I would want to see as part of this though.

• Make sure these 'subsystems' work like rigs. Removal destroying them.


• I would not restrict it just to wrecks though. Why use a burned out wreck if someone is willing to provide a fully functioning ship?


• Make sure it has a long winded R&D process. It took years for the pirate techs to create thier own hulls, it should take a few weeks, minimum for capsuleers to create these junk-prototypes. You are trying to make different technologies to work in harmony after all.


• Keep an element of randomness involved. Give a random mixture of all the key raw stats like CPU, cap and PG. Also, allow the creator to focus on an element, like PG or speed, while sacrificing others, like shield regen and cap. That said, allow for unexpected freak bonuses with a very low random chance of working. The same goes for slot layout.


• If your combining multiple ships, dont give full bonuses for all the hulls. With more ships involved, allow diminishing returns to reduce the over all effectiveness of the blending. Combining two ships, each with two 5% bonuses could give say three 4% bonuses or maybe two 6% ones. Mashing five hulls togther could give you maybe seven bonuses, but they would all be around the 0.5% mark, maybe lower.


• Allow work to be done all through the ships life. By definition, these ships are not finished products but constant works in progress. Allow for attempts to improve, but there should also be a chance that the process will fail and make the ship worse. Maybe even a chance to really cripple the ship.

As I said, I like the concept, but I am not under the impression it should be something that rolls out any time soon. I think this is an idea to be looked at and maybe developed. There is a lot to discuss about the whole thing.