Ship Component costs

Not a very large suggestion, all this really comes down to is a change of cost for various ship components.
The reasons for this is;
1: To decrease the value of small ships like star fighters greatly (and hopefully fix a long time problem where engineers sell freshly built ships to the npc market with profit)
2: To increase the cost of larger vessels somewhat.

One thing I noticed from looking at various starfighters and determining what made up the bulk of their value, its the maneuver stat. Each single maneuver, for some reason, costs 1000. A Z-95 for example, below 200k in value, has more then half of their value due to maneuver alone.
The second largest valuemaker to smaller ships is fuel, but not nearly as bad as maneuver
What surprisingly adds barely any value to a ship is its hull and shields, while being a consist grower as ships get larger.

Thus, my suggested changes:

Maneuver: cost lowered from 1000 to 100
hull: cost increased from 4 to 100
Shields: cost increased from 20 to 150
Missile tube: cost increased from 2000 to 5000
Communications: cost increased from 100 to 500
Sensors: cost increased from 100 to 500
Astro Array, cost increased from 150 to 500

There were already changes to make the use and abuse of sellship discouraged (changes 1066). Personally, if you really, really don’t want an engineer to make a profit off any ship that is built, then all ships should have the minimum available components upon being completed so people can’t just sell the components and sell the ship. Granted, the return on sold components would be mostly insignificant, but it is another step in the “Stopping Abuse” direction.

It is not just about sellship abuse though, but also where a engineering clan sells brand new fighters, for example, for 100k each and upon a death of an owner the ship becomes available on the public market for 200k instead.

With my suggested changes, prices for most starfighters will instantly drop about 60-90k, which brings prices a bit more in line with what engineering factions actually tend to sell starfighters for. While prices for many larger ships will start increasing, and actually serve the same purpose. For example, a corvette will lose a bit due to the decrease in maneuver value but then increase in cost due to its hull and shield total getting a combined worth of 250000 instead of 24000

On a similar note, I think something that would make developing ships a little more interesting would be asking yourself if you want to make a “modular” ship that can be modified in various ways (like most of the CEC ships in canon) or making something with a set, specific purpose. I don’t normally get involved in dev rp, so I don’t know if these are actually considered. However, if you are going for a “modular” design, then the blueprint should build a ship at its minimum component specs instead of making people remove all the components to their minimum. If you are going for a specific purpose ship, then there really shouldn’t be any kind of leeway in removing and upgrading. The minimums and maximums should be set at or near the same rate.

P.S. Sorry if this isn’t related to your topic. It just popped into my head and seemed like a good place to put it.

I kinda like how it currently is on that front. Most ships can be modified to take on additional weaponry, often at the cost of other parts for example. Speaking from experience as I modified tonnes of ships, taking a good look at the ships mins/maxes and working with that goes a long way to making somewhat more powerful ships. If you get blueprints for a ship and you cannot modify the end product even slightly (which I had with a B-wing print I received two TL’s ago) it just leaves you with a sad, sad, feeling.
Aside from that, if the mins/maxes are too close to the end product, stealing and then stripping ships becomes useless as nothing can be removed from those ships.

What also would be nice, imo, is an expansion to the turrets system; currently they are all kinda the same. like 3 lasers/3 ion weapons. It’s a bit dull. It would be nice if smaller ships had turrets with, lets say, 6 quota, you can fill those turrets up with autoblasters, or a laser/ ion. Then you have bigger ships, like MC80’s, who in their description has turbolaser turrets but which fire regular lasers.. (lame) Give those turrets 25 quota, so you can fit in a turbolaser or a whole array of 5 lasers.
Or ISD’s with their turrets featuring 8 ion cannons.

But then you couldn’t kill someone and buy their corvette for 500k!