Should Avorion come with a few ship designs?

[Thundercraft]

I just read the Avorion Trailer Ship topic where someone asked for the ship design as seen at the end of the official trailer. And that got me thinking: Why doesn't Avorion ship with a few ship designs? For that matter... should it?

 

One of the main features of this game is the ability for us to design our own ships. If we rely on someone else's ship design, isn't that "cheating" or at least bypassing this feature? Then again, players are already sharing their ship designs and I imagine this will become a big thing once this is made possible via Steam Workshop.

 

Anyway, it's already possible for players to let the game design their ships for them. To do so, all we have to do is dock with a Shipyard and choose the "Build" option. This allows players to choose from three different ship "Styles" based on the ship styles of the faction who owns the station. And each style can be massively scaled up or even altered (very slightly) with a randomization "seed". (BTW: I think that this is a neat feature. Though, I would also like to have a [Randomize] button to get completely random styles.)

 

Another thought:

 

Perhaps koonschi should hold an official Ship Design Contest, with the possibility of some winning ships being selected to become a part of the base game and their name added to the credits?

 

At least a few games have done just this. Planet Explorers, for example, had a design contest. And a couple of the winning vehicle models were adopted into the base game.

 

Edit:

 

If not complete ship blueprints, I at least think Avorion should come with a much larger variety of "templates" or predefined shapes. Looking in the Build Inventory in Build mode, I find only 8 shapes.

 

And in addition to simple shapes that we could use to build our ships and stations, it would be wonderful to have some basic ship templates and basic station templates to use as a starting point to flesh out our own designs.

[SageThe13th]

Agree with a lot of what you are saying.  The game From the Depths every NPC ship was designed by a player and submitted on the forums, evaluated, and added to the game as official content.  This created a lot of variety without the dev having to design everything.  I have an idea for a ship style that can easily be templated and I wonder anyone else has come up with the same thing.  I see the use for some starter ships.  I don't always feel like designing a ship from scratch.  The procedural generation works well for NPC ships.  But, not so much for ships I want own.

[koonschi]

When Steam workshop for ships is in this should be resolved :)