What I find rather frustrating is the fact that NPC ships are complete pushovers, utterly feeble and no threat whatsoever to someone flying anything properly combat oriented, or even half way reasonably defended. In the fleet submissions, they actually 'asked' people to 'not' make them tough. Imagine that.
"We care more about the looks of a vessel than the performance. Obviously we need it to fly, but we don’t need a super powerful ship from each submission. In fact, quite the opposite. Giving ships weaknesses is just as important as giving them strengths. Maybe your set of ships belong to a faction that focuses on exploration or cargo transport. Not every submission needs to be combat oriented. The more diverse the better! Schine may adapt the systems of your submission to fit within our in-game asset plans."
In my opinion, the pirates one might encounter while developing your own space aught to be relatively tame. Certainly a bit more of a threat than the current crop of obsolete Isanths, but not that much more. Those pirates are what one needs to deal with when flying around in ones starter miner, gathering resources. They are the motive for you to scramble to put a 100 mass turret on your ship and then scrounge to add another.
NPC factions pushing into space and defending their territory should be a whole other kettle of fish. They are the ones that you build towards, the threat of whom should be scary, the reason you need bigger ships, bigger guns, etc.. Having the NPC races fly around the same sort of pissant pop guns that are typical of starter pirates takes any potential challenge out of the game, save PvP in multi-player. And as the necessary balancing features are currently not present for such PvP, there is no challenge there either.
PLEASE let NPC races have some combat worthy assets. When those ships mass upon you, it shouldn't just be spooky, you should shit your pants.
