When you get to the point of 6 stations surrounding spawn you're already overwhelming the buyer with so much choice that it's hardly even worth setting up shop anymore. There's just too much competition. My argument about not being able to find what you need as a buyer applies.
You're assuming that the "first six" are all "active and in abundance" throughout the entire lifetime of the server. My experience on established servers, and in games in general, is that this is rarely the case. Depreciation not really being a thing in most vanilla configs and all, and it's hard for the new blood to set up shop when dead-old-husks literally prevent them from moving in. I can conceive of situations where your argument is valid, but I can ALSO conceive of situations where it is not. Again. Try less absolute thought processes. I mean, if six possible shops is "overwhelming choice" I need to catch more people breaking down with choice anxiety at walmart when they have to chose between a dozen or more cashiers.
Your argument about "not being able to find what you need" DOES indeed apply....but I see it more as a bunch of ships(entities) in a smaller location(like 1 sector) is roughly equivalent to a shopping mall, where a bunch of shops force-spaced by 1 full sector is more like a different corner-store every couple city-blocks of the suburbs. One is CERTAINLY more convenient to shop in and hunt for deals. Density has a quality all of it's own.
If you build a station but save it as a ship it won't function well. It needs thrust and systems. If you build a ship but save it as a station it also won't work well. It needs to maneuver to do its job.
~So derelict Eta isn't a thing, eh?~
If you leave a ship lying around, people can bump into it to move it or use push/pull systems, meaning a ship is more vulnerable, on top of the vulnerabilities it gains from needing to be able to maneuver it (taking up space that could be dedicated to shields for example, as well as liming the effective size because you'll need more and more thrust to move it).
Engineering requirements of the different base-types of entities aside, I say this isn't exactly an argument for/against shops-on-ships. Now put away your ego. here's your "i'm rite" trophy. Now please keep it to the thread topic.
The "waste" is not "sending out ships". It's leaving them around to be able to get a chance for their wares to sell. As explained before, ships are more vulnerable than stations.
Also, your argument about sending a fleet out to certain coordinates makes no sense at all. As I said before, you need to KNOW where to sell your goods, meaning that there needs to be a STATION there for you to be able to tell that it's worth sending a fleet there at all. And what can a station have on it that a ship can't? Correct, a shop module.
Don't assume everyone is so attached to their blocks they can't send out some to "see what happens." Yeah, they're theoretically vulnerable, more so than homebase for sure. Arguably far less than a station when they have AI, regardless of thrust value. You seem to be equating "I wouldn't do it" with "it's not something people should be allowed to do." You don't like to take "it's vulnerable!" risk. good for you. I'd like the OPTION to be there.
Your lack of imagination disturbs me. There are plenty of situations where I would like the option to "send a shop" somewhere, regardless of it's station content.
This is not really what I meant. What I meant is that you can't see, from where you're standing, without having opened the GUI, which shop would be closest to you. This is inconvenient. With the current system you may be able to view who exactly you're buying from, I've never noticed, but that still doesn't take away the fact that being able to buy from the shop you want to buy from is inconvenient, and with many shops cluttering a single sector, NOTHING, yes, absolutely nothing can change that. It's why in real life stores specialise. If you only had stores that sold everything both the shops and the customers would be inconvenienced. And since there's: 1. no good way to set up or advertise a brand, 2. profit margins don't exist when you can produce everything yourself and 3. Starmade provides only a minuscule economy, this is currently pretty much impossible to do without jumping through many more hoops than is necessary to simply line your pockets.
Eh I can somewhat agree with you on the first part. but I challenge you to go in your single player, allow multiple shops per sector(or admin-load to bypass limit) and experiment with say a 9^3 "box shop". repeat-spawn it a couple times and notice how far the "can buy" bubble actually is for each. I think your argument relates to "overlapping shops" like if you build a homebase right-next to a shop-stick?
As for stores that sell everything...just look at the vending machines you see around you. I'm betting there's a "coke" and a "pepsi" (or equivalent) major brands, but looking at both they each sell an iced-tea, a brown-pop, a clear-pop, a fruit juice, a water, etc.. the only real diff being the label. Real life seems to indicate there is an economy to false-choice.
Hell, box-stores wouldn't be able to operate anywhere near each other if that held a glimmer of truth. That's what DRIVES an enconomy: multiple retailers, consumers, supply, demand.
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