Player Features and Ideas Discussion

When I first started playing Eve, the very first day, and I was trying to decide what I wanted my character to do, I eventually settled on salvaging.

I got the idea in my head that the salvaging involved heading out to old battlefields with some kind of industrial ship, grabbing a wreck with a tractor beam, and hauling it back to a station. There it could either be refurbished or broken down and sold at a discount.

Of course I quickly realized that salvaging does not work that way.

However, I think it would be a good idea if it did work that way.

Make the frigates, like the Heron, capable of hauling small wrecks, say up to destroyer size. Make the Noctis capable of hauling larger wrecks, say up to battleship size. For dreads, capitals, and larger, you might need a full scale capital industrial. The Rorquel would be needed to handle titan and super capital wrecks. Wrecks could be stored and processed within the Rorquel itself. Smaller ships would have to tow them.

Hauling wrecks would cause your ship be fly slower, and make modules such as afterburners and microwarpdrives to use more cap.

Once you got the wreck back to station it could either be refurbished back into an almost new condition, or broken down into parts.

The refurbished ship would not have full like-new stats. Certain key stats and bonuses would be worse by a certain percentage. Some bonuses might not exist at all, especially for Tech II/III ships.

The more skilled you are, the better the refurbishing job would be, and the less the refurbishing penalty percentage would be.

The refurbishing/salvaging process itself might work in a way similar to research or industry, with a time and success requirements. Refurbishing/salvaging more advanced ships might require specialized skills and memory banks or blueprints and be more difficult in general.

You would have to always sell refurbished ships at a discount since new ships will always be better. It would also give some players an opportunity to fly above their weight, since they are flying cheaper, slightly used ships.

This. Is. The. Single. Best. Response. Ever.

I could see something like this working -
If every ship was assembled from parts
Those parts are made from minerals

So we we as palmers would end up with something like this
Farm the minerals and then proceed to build the individual parts - cargo bays, drone bays, thrusters etc.
Then each ship would require so many of each part to be built.

Then salvaging would work, because you could repurpose the functional parts. This would add more complexity to the game. Make salvaging something a little more worthwhile, specially seeing as rats would drop this salvage as well.
Another level of complexity would come from the fact that you would need three sizes of each part - small medium and large.

On the industrial side - players would have to have the option to a) just build the parts or b) build the ship and the parts are built along with it. Both would have the same over all time requirements for a finished ship.

I think the lore behind repackaging is that the ship is disassembled into its parts, so this would just add a little more story to each ship. Plus it follows how capital ships are built - piece by piece.