DivineEvil

Mostly agree. Rather than having weaker Independent Targeting turrets, I would like there to be "Manual" turrets, that are 50% stronger and have 30% reduced power and crew demands. All other turrets should have Independent Targeting as a core feature, in order to accentuate autonomous broadside and maneuvering combat over face-to-face, "fire everything!" standoffs of today.

I would consider it a plausible addition, if the base of the weapon is one without the tracking. I've suggested about three months ago for the Pulse Cannons to be changed to resemble something similar, i.e. same penetration, but greater DPS and much lesser rate of fire to make each penetrating shot more significant. Other than that, I have hard time thinking of a way to make it less efficient against smaller targets. If we're talking about fighters and missiles, well, almost all weapons are inefficient against them anyway, even tho some of them are instant-hit. If we're talking about smaller ships, then I can't imagine a kind of ship and its behavior, that would make me miss him with this weapon. Without addressing that, this weapons would just end up as a more overpowered version of a Cannon that is obtained even before you get to Cannons first. If we would get missile launchers, that would work just like that, instead of their current sorry mechanics, I would be much more glad they'd get fixed that way.

Perhaps, but your suggestions do not address this grudge in any way. Inertial dampeners are expensive equipment only feasible for ships of 8 system slots and greater. Usually most ships below this margin can fare perfectly well with their Pitch/Yaw thrusters also braking them. Pitch and yaw rates stays more-or-less the same for the larger ships due to ability to place Thrusters further from CoM for the same % of the volume used. However, braking doesn't get such spatial benefits, so it tanks severely. So, you need Dampeners to brake such capital ships effectively. They do take up a lot of energy, but large ships can easily afford to permanently install a single decent Generator System, that negates the upkeep without effort. You never need an Inertial Dampener greater than 1/40 of the ship volume (2.5%), compared to Generator Blocks, that should occupy at least 10%. If you want a good maneuverability on any ship, that takes about 15% of your ship in Thrusters. Inertial Dampeners aren't really that demanding. Well, aside from being the greatest weak spot on the mid-tier ship, breaking from a sneeze and costing ridiculous money to replace...

Personally I think, that PDC and flak should only attack torpedoes and fighters, and all regular weapons should only attack ships and stations, unless directly ordered to attack the selected target. There's simply no point to allow turrets automatically engage targets they're not meant to work against.

Why? What will that achieve? Realism for realism sake is meaningless. There's no point in limiting the options for engine placement. Realizing your first suggestion would basically necessitate symmetric builds. Despite the fact, that most players do that anyway, what is the meaning behind this complication? Same with fuel, what is the point of introducing this requirement? As I see it, it would only lead to frustration and utterly ridiculous situations where you get stuck somewhere with no ability to get fuel. That's it, you have a ship, that has no fuel, and you have a personal drone, that cannot carry fuel. Benefits?

I rarely use anything but Independent Targeting turrets for everything. This is mostly based on the inconvenience of current camera control, that doesn't allow you to freely track something without holding a button. I only use manual turrets as my capital, long-range weapons or primary mining array. I simply prefer not to bother with pointing my ship at the enemies, just maneuvering to expose them to as many of my weapons as possible, and they're doing the work on their own. Independent Targeting turrets are also good, because ships armed with them will fire at enemies without you ordering them to attack in the strategy view directly, so you can control formations to some extent.

I'm not so sure about that. IIRC they worked only for 5 minutes, before the sector is deactivated. This is why the active sector per player limit was introduced. Mining ships can mine while you're not around them because their sector is kept active by your limit. As far as I can tell the game prioritizes sectors with your ships in them over sectors that you just passing trough.

I think that cloaking would be perfectly fine as long as there's counter-play and sufficient demands. First of all, it would require the special block (perhaps one that is only made out of Naonite), which takes a bit of power upkeep and allows you to move at a certain speed while remaining in cloak (the larger the block, the closer that limit to ship's max velocity). AI ships then will use the cloaking and approach the target near that lower speed limit. Having Scanner upgrade on your ship increases the range at which you can observe a semi-transparent visage of the cloaked ship. You then can attack it in order to break cloak. When cloak is broken by damage or disabled by attacking or turning it off, the uncloaked ship takes 50% increased damage for ~3 seconds. Cloaking should bring life to close-range ships (aside from fixing the damn Railgun ffs) and introduce more interesting tactics. I'm not sure how signature stuff is supposed to work for AI (at what point you can disguise yourself to avoid AI etc), and I don't think it would be effective in PvP either.

I think that turret Research is plenty in that regard. Even without upgrading turrets, players will look completely differently at what they get by fusing looted and bought turrets, given that anything you get as result can be mass-produced indefinitely. For a price.

Fuel Factories and Rocket Factories respectively.

Yes. Third option is preferable because there's already Turret Factories that are necessary for it to work and they are not very convenient in how they operate at the moment, and the fact that Avorion doesn't seem to be an RPG, but rather a strategy game, where you have a third person perspective to issue orders directly. It is an old issue, which for some reason has been overlooked in favor of much more complicated changes and new mechanics. I think it deserves upmost attention over the economy, since we're talking about weapons here - any mid to late game ship has to operate dozens of turrets, and if the only way to mass-produce turrets is trough current Turret Factories with painstaking commodity collection (instead of just money and materials), then the weapons looted or researched have no practical value. We're not even touching the faction mechanics, AI behavior, etc - turrets are bread and butter of playing Avorion. A simple experience of playing the game is severely diminished by the current inability to reproduce the turrets you find and the attachment of Turret Factory production to economy, where nothing else (ships, fighters, torpedoes, systems) is related to it.

1.) First and foremost, Economy has to be scaled down a lot. Like I've been telling for over a year now, there are way too many commodities in the system. In this respect Avorion looks like its trying to compete with other space games with sheer numbers, but in actuality more does not equates better in pretty much any case, for any system, in any game. Balance beats everything. Current lineup of commodities is severely oversaturated and also requires an enormous number of redundant stations, each seemingly constructed to perform every small refinement step for even the most economically negligible goods. Some of these goods do not make sense in the galactic scale, do not make sense in case of completely alien civilizations, redundant variations of each-other or so generic and practically useless, that its outright repulsive. Reducing the number of used commodities also removes the necessity of having as many stations as there is in order to make the economy work, which would allow some more general-use stations added instead, like storage facilities and actual security stations and strongholds. Goods for potential removal for one problem or another include: Protein, Dairy, Fabric, Toxic Waste, Plant, Scrap Metal, Clothes, Tea, Paper, Ore, Corn, Sheep, Cocoa, Chlorine, Raw Oil, Bio Gas, Crystal, Coal, Lead, Beer, Coffee, Ammunition S/M/L, Chemicals, Gem, Food Bars, Food, Books, Paint, Power Units, Metal Plate, Fuel, Energy Generators, Neutron and Proton Accelerators etc. To remodel the system in a more reasonable fashion, the general categories of economic structures has to be established, namely Civilian, Military, Industrial and Scientific. For each category there should be a reasonable collection of finished end-user goods of variable credit values (around 5 per category). From that point, the economy should be branched off downward to accommodate the production of these goods, with the longest chain not exceeding 3 steps, and with as many commodities having multiple applications as reasonably possible. That would allow players to at least have a chance to remember trade routes and specific locations, instead of stumbling around blindly and relying completely on the high-end Trading Systems to find anything workable. 2.) Economy should be untied from the production of Turrets completely. It is already true for Systems, Fighters and Torpedoes. Player's assets should be attached solely to Credits and Materials, and the Economy should only offer the way to earn these. That also removes many commodities, whose entire existence is based on production of turrets alone. Turret Factories will be fine with just generating blueprints for the turrets players obtained trough looting or research (the horse I'm beating here isn't just dead; it has smelled funny for a while now) and offering production of set models for only credits and materials. 3.) Preferably, economy should be tied to the behavior of the given Faction. End-user stations should consume the commodities to sustain and improve their abilities in four previously mentioned categories. The specifics are up for debate, but in my opinion: - Supporting Civilian bracket grants the NPC faction more sophisticated trading vessels, that buy from and sell to player stations in larger volumes at a time, and also increases the rewards for station-given quests and legit distress signals. - Supporting Military bracket grants the NPC faction greater military presence in their own sectors, causes them to intercept pirates and Xsotans attacking the players in their area of influence occasionally, and increases the rewards for assistance against hostiles. - Supporting Industrial bracket increases the rate of production of all faction's stations and grants discounts for buying the products. Equipment docks sell and Turret Factories produce better mining and salvaging turrets. - Supporting Scientific bracket amplifies NPC faction's tech level, gradually improving the damage of installed turrets. Weapon turrets at Equipment Docks and Turret Factories are better, Systems are cheaper, and fusing turrets at Research Stations produces weapons with greater tech level, and thus stats. Satisfying faction's needs in the commodities for these categories temporarily increase the internal counter, which introduces these changes. This way the player can not only trade in order to earn money, but also actively support the NPC faction of his choice to reap the benefits. There are many options for the rewards of supporting NPC in general, like significantly reducing the reconstruction site cost or gradually aligning faction's diplomatic relations to other factions and players with the supporter, etc. These are my core ideas about the economy. There are lots of other interesting and potentially beneficial suggestions, that might go as complex as you'd like, but for me there's little meaning in discussing them until those three main points are addressed in one way or another.

Gates now are just secondary means of travel mostly in pursuit of trade routines for smaller ships. Once the player gets the means to jump dozens of sectors across, the use of gates goes out of the window, even despite the lengthy cooldown timers, which still beat the amount of time it takes to move across the gate network. This is then only beaten by wormholes, that allow you instantaneous travel across the regions and tiers of the galaxy. If you'd want to introduce Gates into the faction warfare, you'd first want hyperspace blockers built in a form of a station, that creates dead-zones of a certain radius, that prevents the hyperspace jumps into any sector within, hostile or otherwise, the same way space rifts currently do. In this case, Gates can in fact become an important strategic objective, that allows travel in and out of faction territories without constantly disabling and enabling the blockers, and also creates the choke points. In order to balance these things out, both Gates and Blockers should require an enormous amount of energy generation and associated crew demands. Gates take up more energy the further the distance they cover, and Blockers generate the field proportional to the energy generation provided, meaning that they never have any spare energy after all systems are accounted for. Moreso, Gate connections cannot cross one-another, and Blockers will not activate if their field encroaches on the fields that are already there.

Fighters always enter the Flak range during their approach. They also stay in that range for the most time, because there's no algorithm for them to fall back to their maximum range. Ten clicks is a bit of an overkill either way.

That is true. For the most parts people just use way too many blocks to outline every detail - that's what bugs me the most. When a ship features thousands of blocks, where it could look nearly as good if made by few hundreds, given some deliberate limits to resolution (few or no blocks less than 1 in any dimension is a good start), it makes it hard to to make any mods. The relatively recent function of hiding blocks (which shows only specific blocks) on its own allows to work on internal components without messing with ship's hull. Focused-based camera is really not that bad. However, I've also noticed many ships has severely fragmented systems too, which cannot be worked around. So for me the problem is mostly with that most players do not pre-plan their builds, and therefore have to add extra system blocks multiple times to achieve balance. The only reason I'm not uploading my own designs to Steam is because I want to release some of them together with the Google Spreadsheet toolkit for pre-planning and pre-balancing the design... and finishing it is tough, because mining the values manually is pretty tiring. There's of course some of them on wiki, but they are insufficient or even outdated:

That's a reason to use ships with low block count. Shape of the ship has no bearing on that really. Besides, even if the ship exterior is extremely complex, if it is built in few blocks on the inside, it is still possible to easily modify it. You're always welcome to give specific suggestion on how that process can be made more convenient. From where I see it, its something the ship designers might consider themselves, and not something one should shove to the developers, who already made good building tools with very few apparent problems. Tell that to the people, who spend weeks building absolutely amazing designs. These are warships also, but people build them for other people, who can't spare that time or have no aptitude to build them, but want to use pretty ships still. These people answer accordingly, which is why beautiful ships get the top ratings across the board. Whether another player will ever see your or someone's else beautiful ship is largely irrelevant, because that's what you want to look at. Everyone has the ability to make modular designs, where internal components can be replaced block-by-block to fit the expectations of the player using the ship etc, but even then it has little to do with meta-game.

Well considering the material/credit costs for different blocks, all materials are seem to be used as a composites. The majority of the block function is provided by the given material, and credits are used to purchase and assemble varied internal components, that are made of all sorts of other materials. Ultimately, we can argue an addition of composites or even completely new materials as long as there's an actual problem to solve. There isn't. The objective here is not to demonstrate the advantages alloys give. It is to demonstrate why they are necessary to make the game better by introducing something otherwise unavailable or by solving something otherwise unresolved. At the moment the idea doesn't seem to offer neither of those. You can first cover your entire ship with Ogonite armor, and then just make gaps in convenient places to place Avorion turret bases, hull, crew quarters etc to mount turrets to. There's actually nobody in my knowledge who would specifically target the turret mount to disable it, because its just faster and easier to destroy the ship entirely. It also has little bearing on railgun projectiles, because they do multiplied damage to the ship itself regardless of what they hit. As long as that's how the railguns work, nobody gives a damn about armor special feature, and everyone is using it simply for greater amount of ship HP given per unit of mass. No, because shields, energy blocks and protective hull (in case you're using it instead of armor to be more mobile) are the only blocks feasible to upgrade with Naonite. Everything else works perfectly fine as Titanium. Lack of Armor and other blocks in specific materials is a deliberate design choice to encourage mixed use. When you got tons of old materials, you sell them, just like you sell the outdated turrets when you have something to replace them with. This is the primary way of acquiring credits to meet the increased expenses of more advanced galaxy regions. The only thing I can derive from the arguments given so far, is that you want a circumvention of the deliberately designed limitations on materials, which makes them better or worse to be used for certain things and choices associated with it. Unfortunately, I still fail to recognize why these limitations is an issue. Yes, or you can just plate your ship in Hull instead of armor, which gives you exactly the same effect. Or you can cover the nose of your ship with armor, and keep everything else wrapped in Hull. You can even substitute full blocks of Hull with Crew Quarters or Cargo Bays, which will cost more, but weight less for the same amount of HP and associated capacity bonuses. All of that with a single material. You know, because Avorion actually allows you to build you ship however you want. It is difficult enough to balance the stats of a ship design as it is (unless you distribute and calculate them preliminarily, like I do) by just placing and removing blocks, and you suggest to make it even harder by introducing new materials? There is such a thing as "too much choice". Well, maybe not? Maybe players should just build the inertial dampeners to fit the ship? Maybe the massive weight and power demand of Iron inertial dampeners is a feature, that has to be dealt with, and not a bug? Slightly upgraded versions that give slightly improved stats do not warrant the introduction of entire alloy mechanic, especially considering the same effect is acquired by simply modifying the block layout. Such features can be justified for the games, that use predefined modules with specific stats - there you would like to have mods/refits, that allow finer tuning. In the game like Avorion, where you can scale the systems to half-meter accuracy and get stats precisely relative to that scale, it is entirely redundant. Ferro-concrete does not offer "minor advantages" - its a combination of materials and structure, that makes the original components obsolete, and allows all of the modern skyline construction. It is used specifically because the introduction of a steel framework effectively covers the flaws of the sheer concrete for comparatively low difference in cost. Similarly, Steel is used specifically because introduction of a tiny fraction of Carbon into the molecular structure of Iron produces the material, that is better than pure Iron in pretty much everything. In this situation for someone to use pure Iron, is if they cannot afford to forge Steel or if they specifically need Iron for unconventional uses (i.e. chemistry).

Yes, but the suggestion is a statement for developers to consider and act upon. A good suggestion has to clearly state what should be done, and then the reason why it should be done for the betterment of the game. With the suggestion given here as it is, we will either get the alloys, that are better than the pure materials, which will make the pure materials meaningless and applying them more tedious, or allows that are weaker than the originals, which will in turn render them unnecessary. Like BlackGazebo have said, the only feasible way to somewhat improve the value of lower-tier materials is by making them better than other materials in some particular fashion, like making Titanium Thrusters and Naonite Engines more powerful for the same volume, where at the moment all Thrusters and Engines has exactly the same output and differ only in weight and durability; And these changes has to be to the magnitude, where players would actually consider sacrificing that durability and weight for the benefits granted. Even then the value of these materials won't change, perhaps only the frequency of trade would. Other than that, Avorion as it is now has players too independent in their needs to facilitate any real commerce, aside from turret, module and material trading. Some of it does exist now, but limited in what players can reliably offer. Each player in itself is a faction leader, because he holds the control over as many ships and stations as he can afford to and is technically its immaterial, immortal agent. The only question is how much time you can spend on the development of that faction. Personally I find the situation with materials more than manageable. Setup of the commodity trade market and general combat balance worries me much, much more, which is why I keep lobbying changes on those all the time to no avail.

Well, there's very few games (at least of what I'm aware of), that somehow maintain the value of early-game resources in the face of late-game analogues. There's nothing inherently wrong with leaving the old stuff behind. Low-grade materials can be mined much, much faster with the better, more efficient mining/salvage turrets and sold for credits, and you also can use them for stations, which do not depend on the size compression and efficiency of better materials unlike ships do. You can have a parallel disposition towards the weapon turrets of lower grade, but then the same logic goes - if you got a better sword, why would you care for you old, rusty one? Maybe you can some particular memories associated with a weapon turret, but that doesn't apply for the materials. What is the point of bringing them back, apart from Iron, that is used heavily for Inertial Dampeners until Avorion and for producing cargo shuttles?

Unfortunately there's currently no way to duplicate or reproduce a found turret. The only options are turrets bought in Equipment Docks (which rarely can give something remarkable) or ones built in the Turret Factories (which will require collecting appropriate trading goods).

Lmao Other voxel games (e.g. From the Depths) lets you build the "guts" of a laser weapon in one spot and transmit the energy to an actual firing piece (lens assembly) on a turret base via Transceivers, which are fancy mirror assemblies. What this means is the actual laser turret can be very small and light even though the damage it projects is comparable with a much larger cannon turret. I think this is what the OP is modeling their idea on. But that comparison is free of realism because very high-energy lasers (in the GW or TW order) can't be reflected the same way low-energy lasers can. Any material that "reflects" light at a >0 degree angle is going to absorb some energy, and so a mirror is going to absorb 1) a lot of energy in 2) an extremely small area. This causes all kinds of problems - even assuming that the mirroring material is able to "sink" this heat without vaporizing in seconds, it's still going to expand, which will create a non-flat surface, which is going to send your beam into a non-intended direction, potentially causing a RAD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) event. So this means that the laser "guts" or cavity has to be in a position to "project" the beam directly to the lens assembly without any intervening mirrors, which means that it has to be part of any turret assembly. (lenses can also heat up and cause RADs but that's a totally different topic) When the reply has no associated quotes to your specific post, you should presuppose it to be the reply to the OP. I'm fully aware of all the things you've written, although I'm vastly more concerned about the balance side of things (which is the only reason I'm not screaming about the utterly ridiculous nature of Lightning guns in space at every corner). But even then, OP author haven't provided any balance justification for the change either.

a.) Ogonite is a perfect material to provide good amount of HP with Armor blocks, and Ogonite rock is great for additional mass. Considering it is otherwise only effective as a ship armor, it is hardly a challenge to mine enough for that purpose. No competent game developer would introduce an equipment piece to only alleviate someone's laziness. b.) I've never encountered issues with that. 2 Km seems to be more than enough to give enough clearance for everyone. Besides, if you place two stations too close together, its you mistake, not the developer's misjudgment. c.) I see no reason. If you cannot bring the ship for contact safely, then its most likely the problem of your own control over that ship. I strongly oppose the idea of eliminating mundane player "hardships". d.) Why? e.) Perhaps, although there might be some unforeseen technical issues with doing so, like failing to track the crew payment or registering the insurance for the ship that has been renamed. It is greatly depends on whether the ship's name is a identifier (unique entity ID, that is referenced for interactions with game systems) or a header (independent object property, that has no function other than to display the contained text here and there).

You have both failed to argue from the realism perspective (since there's no mention of using mirrors in beam turrets anywhere) and from the balance perspective (why the hell do we even need these changes).

a.) I think that claimable asteroids should generate with the chosen material content. That would mean that players would need more of these asteroids existing, so the asteroid-rich sectors should be more expansive to offer more than 3-to-4 asteroids per sector. b.) It's not more realistic, since noble metals are often found in the same deposits together, but it just doesn't make much sense to have regular resources to have a whole mine dedicated to them. If I had to chose, I would make that every claimable asteroid has its own abundance of variable materials, which you'd need to scan to discover. Then you can simply found the mine on it and choose which materials you want it to refine. The more abundant the given material is on the asteroid, the higher the mining rate is. Since the decision is about "what ores I want to ignore", you can even choose all of the ores, but you'd have to dedicate storage to hold it, which in itself is a incentive to only select the ones you can use or sell. c.) No. There simply should be less commodities in general. For example, Coal and Oil are different forms of the same organic decay products, that cannot be found in space. Any space-faring species should be able to collect hydrogen gas and carbon and produce all the things, that Coal and Oil are used for. Economic part of the game is insanely oversaturated with commodities that are redundant (uselessly cheap or inconsequential), obsolete (unfit for the star-faring setting) or generic (specific for the human economies, not for alien civilizations). At least half of the economic goods has to be purged together with the unnecessarily long production chains and stations associated with them. d.) Well, you can technically imagine using my prior-mentioned system of abundance and marry it to the ability to physically mine the asteroid in question, which would drop commodities according to the abundance values, but I doubt it make sense that you can get refined, tradeable goods from cutting the asteroid apart. As an alternative, perhaps Koonschi should add another loot object type, which is a medium-sized container with one or two random commodities held inside. e.) Yes. In my opinion all production chains should end in some high-tier building, like shipyards and research stations, that are only buying these sorts of goods (civilian, military, industrial and technological). These stations consume the goods to improve the behavior of the factions, like having greater ships or better tech-level weapons on those ships and sold at Equipment Docks, etc. This way trading not only makes trading profitable, but also grants long-term effects for the AI factions you patronize. Goods like Toxic Waste should not exist at all, because almost any sort of production involves having remaining scrap, and in open space getting rid of any waste products is the most trivial task imaginable. f.) Yes, but there should only be two or three such farms - crops, vegetables and fruits. Rice, Wheat, Potato etc are all Terran commodities - such names should not be used in a game, where not only the actors are alien species, but the game world itself is completely different galaxy. g.) No. There simply should be no optional ingredients. Perhaps some factories should be able to produce different commodities using different components (you chose which one you want it to make, and it will use the specific recipe). Fertilizer is not optional - without it the soil will become barren and unable to bear any produce. h.) The economy system is riddled with these cases. Wheat is a Plant. Oil is a Fuel. Wire is a Conductor, etc. When I was talking about wiping half of the commodities from the game, these are the ones which come to mind first.

Mostly agree with the sentiment, however I will add my personal thoughts on the matter: Object Detector - The effect range should be kept in realistic brackets - something like 6/12/18/24/32/sector + 2/3/4/5/6/* for permanent installation. Also, it might be justified to even equalize the bonuses to encourage the permanent installation, but players who are used to swap this module around all the time won't like that. Tractor Beam - I consider it a first category, similar to Quantum Hyperspace Upgrade - Neither are needed all the time, but performing their corresponding actions without these is pretty encumbering. Shield Reinforcer - Agree, however the issue is also with the frequency of shield-penetrating weapons as such. Not only the player may never need to use shield-penetrating weapons, but he also rarely will encounter them where they are the issue and the given module is a solution. Given that SP weapons are extremely rare and rather unremarkable compared to their conventional analogues, there's absolutely no reason to sacrifice that much to get so little in return. It costs an absolute ton to sell, and that's as much of a positive as you can get from it. It's a Useless category item. Engine Upgrade - The system module itself is fine, but it has little use considering the generic nature of engine boost, that essentially negates most of the need for conventional thrust. Engine boost has to be nerfed in one way or another, so that players will have to rely on base thrust and welcome the use of this upgrade. Trading System - More useful than you seem to describe it as. It is good as long as it displays the discount/markup ratio, which the player can use to buy and sell for best prices. Since commodities do not degrade and can be stored anywhere, its unnecessary to run specific trade routes. When the rarity level allows to sort lists, it also adds a lot of uses, like quickly finding the places to sell the goods you currently carry. Scanner Upgrade - Agree, but the solution is to make something dependent on it. For example, scanner can be made necessary to acquire lock on distant targets, and without it you cannot send the fighters nor launch torpedoes Shield Converter - Not entirely useless, because it can be placed on small ships to improve their survivability much better than Shield Booster for the same system slot. Since power demands are percentile, it wont take much energy from a ship that needs less of it. However, it doesn't make sense, that the backup charge is placed on the Booster, rather than converter. I personally would prefer Booster being just that, maybe having a chance to reduce damage against particular weapons, but the Converter should have the backup charge and maybe some other options, like mitigating a portion of incoming damage at the expense of ship's energy storage. In fact, it may not have any shield capacity bonuses at all as long as the functional nature of the shield is changed significantly. Also should be renamed to Shield Modulator. Mining System - This upgrade is an artifact from the times, where rich asteroids were unrecognizable from all others until you'd have this system. One solution it to somewhat complicate the mining again and require this module for efficient harvesting, but allow players to scan nearby asteroids to see if they're rich without it. Another option is to add bonuses to mining turrets (damage, efficiency, range) that this module can give from permanent installation. Battery Upgrade - The upgrade is fine, but the power management in the game is non-existent. I have already commented on that in another thread. Cargo Upgrade - Also more useful than described. A percentage bonus is amazing for massive cargo haulers, and flat bonus can give the cargo capacity to a ship, that otherwise has none.