Ideas along this line have been mentioned before (including by myself in this thread from a few days ago), but I thought I would flesh it out more fully.
The current hull/armour crafting trees seem unnecessarily complex/are too limited in terms of inter-compatibility, or at least they do to me.
Under the current system the colours and non-cube shapes are all dead-ends that are not inter-compatible. Imagine this scenario - you are constructing a ship and use standard armour. It is mostly black and has quite a lot of slopes and other non-cube shapes, to get these you use the tree grey hull -> black hull -> black standard armor -> black standard non-cubes. After you've been building for a while you decide that actually you would rather use advanced armor. The cubic black standard armor can be re-crafted into advanced armor, but to get the advanced armor non-cubes you have to go advanced armor cube -> advanced armor non-cube. The standard armor non-cubes are now useless. Still later you decide that some parts of the ship would look better in blue. Now even you cubic black advanced armor is useless and you have to go all the way back to grey hull and go through grey hull -> blue hull -> blue standard armor -> blue advanced armor -> blue advanced non-cubes.
Now I appreciate that you could just say that in the above example I have just been really indecisive and it is my own fault, and of course that is true, but the armour crafting scheme could make it so much easier to deal with this scenario. If you could re-craft e.g black standard armor wedges into black advanced armor wedges that would be so much more useful, as would the ability to re-paint armour into a different colour.
Essentially what I am advocating is for the crafting system to allow you to do black hull wedge -> black standard armor wedge -> black advanced armor wedge, and black hull -> blue hull, black standard armor wedge -> blue standard armor, etc, rather than forcing you to go back through the cubes or all the way back to grey hull.
Of course at the moment black standard armor and blue standard armor are produced via
grey hull + black paint(tekt) -> black hull + macet -> black standard armor
grey hull + blue paint(larimar) -> blue hull + hylat -> blue standard armor
so the difference between blue standard armor and black standard armor is more than just blue paint vs black paint, but this could be reflected in the inter-crafting. If converting black standard armor to blue standard armor worked like black standard armor + blue paint + 3 hylat capsule -> blue standard armor you would admittedly spend less hylat making your blue standard armor than normal, but then you've lost the macet used in making the black armour. This could admittedly be used to get around a shortage of hylat, but I don't see that as a particular problem, you've still used more resources overall.
Simply allowing black hull wedge -> black standard armor wedge -> black advanced armor wedge would not circumvent any resource requirements as it should just be the same as black hull -> black standard armor -> black advanced armor.
My preference would also be to allow wedge -> cube as well as cube -> wedge which could either be implemented by allowing the reverse crafting route, or amalgamating the armour multi-slots into single entities rather than 5 separate ones (which seems by far the best solution to everything to me). The result of this would than be that crafting one unit of hull would give you 1 in each of the multi-slot pieces, but using any of the multi-slot pieces would decrease the total of all of them by 1. This would then automatically allow you to re-craft hull or standard armor non-cubes into higher armour rated types.
TL;DR
1) Amalgamate armour multi-slots into single entities, thus allowing wedge -> cube and standard wedge -> advanced wedge
2) Allow 're-painting' of one armour colour into another for half the cost of crafting the new armour colour from scratch (e.g. black standard armor + blue paint + 3 hylat capsule-> blue standard armor)
Hopefully this all made sense and thanks for reading!
The current hull/armour crafting trees seem unnecessarily complex/are too limited in terms of inter-compatibility, or at least they do to me.
Under the current system the colours and non-cube shapes are all dead-ends that are not inter-compatible. Imagine this scenario - you are constructing a ship and use standard armour. It is mostly black and has quite a lot of slopes and other non-cube shapes, to get these you use the tree grey hull -> black hull -> black standard armor -> black standard non-cubes. After you've been building for a while you decide that actually you would rather use advanced armor. The cubic black standard armor can be re-crafted into advanced armor, but to get the advanced armor non-cubes you have to go advanced armor cube -> advanced armor non-cube. The standard armor non-cubes are now useless. Still later you decide that some parts of the ship would look better in blue. Now even you cubic black advanced armor is useless and you have to go all the way back to grey hull and go through grey hull -> blue hull -> blue standard armor -> blue advanced armor -> blue advanced non-cubes.
Now I appreciate that you could just say that in the above example I have just been really indecisive and it is my own fault, and of course that is true, but the armour crafting scheme could make it so much easier to deal with this scenario. If you could re-craft e.g black standard armor wedges into black advanced armor wedges that would be so much more useful, as would the ability to re-paint armour into a different colour.
Essentially what I am advocating is for the crafting system to allow you to do black hull wedge -> black standard armor wedge -> black advanced armor wedge, and black hull -> blue hull, black standard armor wedge -> blue standard armor, etc, rather than forcing you to go back through the cubes or all the way back to grey hull.
Of course at the moment black standard armor and blue standard armor are produced via
grey hull + black paint(tekt) -> black hull + macet -> black standard armor
grey hull + blue paint(larimar) -> blue hull + hylat -> blue standard armor
so the difference between blue standard armor and black standard armor is more than just blue paint vs black paint, but this could be reflected in the inter-crafting. If converting black standard armor to blue standard armor worked like black standard armor + blue paint + 3 hylat capsule -> blue standard armor you would admittedly spend less hylat making your blue standard armor than normal, but then you've lost the macet used in making the black armour. This could admittedly be used to get around a shortage of hylat, but I don't see that as a particular problem, you've still used more resources overall.
Simply allowing black hull wedge -> black standard armor wedge -> black advanced armor wedge would not circumvent any resource requirements as it should just be the same as black hull -> black standard armor -> black advanced armor.
My preference would also be to allow wedge -> cube as well as cube -> wedge which could either be implemented by allowing the reverse crafting route, or amalgamating the armour multi-slots into single entities rather than 5 separate ones (which seems by far the best solution to everything to me). The result of this would than be that crafting one unit of hull would give you 1 in each of the multi-slot pieces, but using any of the multi-slot pieces would decrease the total of all of them by 1. This would then automatically allow you to re-craft hull or standard armor non-cubes into higher armour rated types.
TL;DR
1) Amalgamate armour multi-slots into single entities, thus allowing wedge -> cube and standard wedge -> advanced wedge
2) Allow 're-painting' of one armour colour into another for half the cost of crafting the new armour colour from scratch (e.g. black standard armor + blue paint + 3 hylat capsule-> blue standard armor)
Hopefully this all made sense and thanks for reading!