Increasing the profitability of the ship designer.

[Keon]

So far, in starmade, you have a lot of carreer options. You can mine, you can run a crafting factory, you can trade, and you can fight pirates and/or players.

The problem is, you can't make a living designing ships. Sure, you can upload them, but when somebody buys them, you get no money. And you can't make a station or something that holds ships for sale, because it's all too easy to steal them, at least in my experience.



I see two ways to fix this. One is a simple quick fix, but it doesn't really allow shipyards and companies to develop. Also, it becomes too easy to steal ships designs and take credit. This is: Let the designer of a ship take 10% of all profits he gets for it.



The second option is more in depth, but allows a bigger economy. It involves removing the option to buy ships from thin air entirely, which might be a good idea, after all. (It kinda breaks immersion to find an undefended salvager and have the player pop out, buy a combat craft, and smash you to spacedust.) This idea would involve allowing stations (and maybe ships?) to create a construction facility/drydock/shipyard/whatever. I don't know the specifics yet, but you would need to have factory inputs and such with the materials, and then you would input some data device, and the ship would build. BAM! Shipyards have to create their own line of products, you can't make ships appear out of nowhere, you can see a ship before you buy it, and ship builders can charge whatever price they want (provided people will pay...).



Of course, these would be popular raiding targets, so defences would be set up around them, and attackers would come to get at the free riches inside, increasing the livelyhood of the game.



tl;dr: add options that allow the designer of a ship to get money from his/her effort. Either this is done at the catalog screen or designers need to create shipyards to sell their wares.

What do you think? Please comment and suggest changes and tell me what you think! Thanks for reading the wall of text! EDIT: Yes, I searched before I posted. There are ideas for shipyards, but only one I found actually adressed the issue I had, and even that, indirectly. It was also old, so I figured I might as well start this guy.

 

[LordBrightraven]

I concur, making a living as a ship designer is a very interesting idea. But every designer having a shipyard could be tricksy.



Perhaps, we could implement a digital rights management system (something reasonable, that is.)? As the catalog is revamped and trading introduced, a player may perhaps buy a \"licence\" for constructing, say, ten ships at their own shipyard. After ten ships have been built, the licence would then expire on its own. Of course, this would still allow people to \"reverse engineer\" the ships to learn of intricate reactor designs, weapons installations etc, which I think is perfectly fine and adds a flair of realism to it.

Anyhow, this way one could sell the \"design\" itself (as a limited blueprint) and let the player provide the materials etc at his local shipyard or something. This would also increase the feasability of smaller design bureaus that don\'t have large amounts of resources to mass-produce grand ships for customers, but instead just sell their designs. This way, they only have to construct the model ship and the rest can be sold to customers to assemble at their own favourite shipyard.

 

[Keon]

Yeah, it would be cool to sell designs and stuff, etc.



As for reverse engineering, what\'s to stop you from reverse engineering a ship and then rescanning it, etc? It seems like there needs to be a way to do DRM like that as well. Thanks for the thoughts.

 

[LordBrightraven]

I had not considered the fact of being able to rescan a bought vessel. Hmm, perhaps some sort of \"designer module\" containing the ship model\'s name and the name of the designer. While this block remains, the saving function of the ship as a blueprint would be disabled. You get the benefit of knowing your ship is of the model \"x\" and who designed it (bragging rights perhaps? Behold, I have a Keon Dropship!).

This block would be unable to be removed until all other blocks (save the ship core) are gone. Thus, you could pick apart a ship and build a separate copy using a different core but it would take you quite some time and probably be inferior (space pirate knockoffs! :D )

 

[Morrigi]

Jesus Christ, you did not just mention DRM as a part of GAMEPLAY.

 

[LordBrightraven]

In this case though, it\'s not meant to fuck a client over out of pure greed but to ensure that being a spaceship designer is even a viable option in-game. Currently, you could make a ship, sell it, the person could just save it, share the design, and you got no sale ever again. The original designer having spent many frustrating hours with the symmetry tool gets shafted.

You\'d pretty much sell 1 ship ever as everyone would just copy the rest.

The whole idea of having limited blueprints would enhance gameplay in my opinion, not (as SONY did IRL) introduce rootkits and BSODs to your BOBBY AI. Nor would it limit you to only \"use your ships for non-piratical acts in the known-universe\". You could sell your ship, fine, that\'s totally cool. Add more cannons, awesome. The second hand ship market should be a thing. Recent arrival in the Galaxy\'s frontier region?

Have 15k creds? Head to the nearest space bar, chat with some people, buy a refurbished Mór freighter for 10k and start adventuring!

This is not something run by megacorpopatent-trolls but y\'know, to allow someone to RP as a ship designer and actually survive (when food gets added and people start space-starving).



Besides the use of the word \"DRM\", what find you objectable?

 

[Damiann47]

Really this is something I only see pratical for small scale ships, for something like say a capital ship it takes A LOT of materials for a well designed one. I mean if someone has the ability to produce more then one capital then more power to them. Although for mass producing fighters, I say that\'s kinda a neat way to do that.

 

[Keon]

I\'m curious, do you guys like the catalog idea or the shipyard idea more? I should probably flesh them both out when I get a chance with more ideas.

 

[BeefBacon]

I love this idea.

 

[Limastra]

I think that the catalog is a better way to go. Instead of people buying someone\'s design and then stealing it, the catalog could come with an automatic protection of a design that could allow you to grant certain individuals that you choose to modify your ship. The ship, when bought, could not be cataloged again by the buyer because it would be a Designer Blueprint, meaning that the do not have the rights to catalog it whatsoever, unless you gave them permission. They would have to fully deconstruct the ship in order to be allowed to catalog it. This means, you could have people you trust upgrade your ship, while keeping the thieves away from your valuable design.

I also like the idea of being able to see what you are buying before you buy it.

 

[Keon]

So the build block has a problem, it can be used to eat planets alive. This really isn\'t balaced, so what I think should happen is this: the build mode becomes holographic. To actually make changes, you need to have the materials in inventory, and then you need to shoot the hologram with a constructo-beam, which, like a salvager, could be mounted on a ship or turret. This would replace my shipyard idea, meaning a shipyard would be a ship or station with a ton of constructobeams sitting there. That way, to build a station you just need some assembly ships nearby with the materials, and you can build away. Shipyards could still be player operated, though this does make it a bit harder to fully automate.

 

[Limastra]

What if I log on in the middle of a sector without a construction platform nearby? I logged off in my ship, and someone does one of two things to it: takes it for themself, or destroys it for fun. What am I to do? Traveling to the nearest building station (Which I don\'t know where it is because I don\'t keep track of every single shipyard I see) could be miles and miles away, and moving at one meter a second doesn\'t help me get there any faster. Of course I\'m a noob and didn\'t take any ship cores with me *facepalm*. Wouldn\'t it be so much easier if I could just spend some money to buy a ship designed by someone else and continue on my adventure?



Of course the people I bought it from would be payed a commission for selling me a ship. When do you buy a ship usually? When you are without one, or find a better one in the catalog. I don\'t want to have to fly around looking for the five shipyards built by players to get my ship. It would make more sense if shipyards were implemented like naturally spawning things.

But back to my first problem, what if I\'m stuck in the middle of a vast dead space with nothing but a few astroids? Why, you could be able to be able to buy a generic transport ship for yourself! It wouldn\'t have any weapons to start with, so it would basically be a way to fly to the nearest shipyard.

 

[Keon]

It\'s true, and I may be overestimating the economy that would develop. It\'s certainly possible that the catalog idea is the best. However, I do sort of like the way we could get rid of the infinite resources problem (from catalog), the way that planets can be mined instantly, and the fact that players with enough money can switch from an undefended salvager to a warship instantly. And what should you do if you are stuck in deadspace? Suicide, I guess. Or, if you really don\'t want to do that, walk to a nearby shop.



I\'m not saying it\'s perfect. And as for it not being about eating planets, it can if the ideas it would add would also fix that.



Anyways, your concerns are definitely valid, and that way may end up being the best way. Thanks for the thoughts.