Chop shops

[Bugbear]

From what I've read in my travels on this forum, it's possible to change the stats of a ship by editing the ?.plist file (correct me if I'm wrong).

So for the purposes of immersion, would it be possible to have these values modified at a chop shop, in game, for a fee?

Things like adding extra missile pylons, altering pitch and roll settings...stuff like that.

[Kaks]

We'll see!

If such a tweakability were to be implemented, there'd have to be inbuilt trade offs: if you add a missile bay, you'd have to choose between reducing speed or manouverability, or maybe it'd make the ship more prone to malfunctions/easier to damage, etc...

[Killer Wolf]

i'd say a missile bay would just reduce cargo size, nothing else. there is the additional matter to consider as to how these alterations would affect resale, surely a (for eg) Cobra that had missile bay removed for extra cargo would be good for a trader to buy, and a Cobra w/ the cargo bay chopped down to hold 8 missiles would be great for a bounty hunter type, but how should both those mod affect a ship when you come to trade it in?

[Smivs]

Simple, the resale value of a 'chopped' ship would be considerably less, even if the mods were perceived as beneficial.
It would be like our cars tody...try taking a souped-up Corsa to a second-hand car dealer and see what trade-in he'll give you. Precious little as he knows it's going to be almost impossible to sell on.

[Thargoid]

As things currently stand, most values in shipdata.plist (to which you refer I think) are read-only to JS.

There are ways and means around a few items, but not the kind of thing you are considering here to any great extent. For example the only way to add an extra missile bay is to manually hack the relevant shipdata file.

[Switeck]

...And the NPC ships cannot even have side lasers.