Upgrading ships.

[elite]

I have been trading and asteroid mining for ages now and finally got myself enough cash to buy a nice second hand ship at Zaonce.

I brought a standard model Oohauler L-crate freighter.
I got it because of it's 150t cargo bay (now extended to 165t with a large cargo bay extention). Think of all the mined material I can now sell.

However after buying the ship and saving the game I found that the ship wasn't capable of having all the equipment that I needed to be an asteroid miner.
What's more, it had no weapon facings, so I had got myself a large freighter but without any weapons or decent equipment.

Of course I never saved my last commander in a separate file so I thought I had lost all my previous Cobra's weapons and equipment.

Before I brought the freighter it didn't say anywhere on screen that is couldn't have weapons or some essential equipment fitted.
However all wasn't lost because I just edited the ship's shipyard file so that is could now be fitted with the equipment I needed.

Anyway, the moral of this short story is..... If you are thinking of buying a new ship, make sure it can house all the weapons and equipment you need first. Or, just cheat like me and edit the relevant shipyard file.

[Commander McLane]

Anyway, the moral of this short story is..... If you are thinking of buying a new ship, make sure it can house all the weapons and equipment you need first. Or, just cheat like me and edit the relevant shipyard file.

As far as the first sentence is concerned: That's what the wiki's ship-page is good for. Providing information about all the ships. And YES: Not every ship can fit every piece of equipment!!! And there is a system behind that. E.g. the Oohauler simply is no fighter. It will depend on its escorts to defend itself. (Sorry for the player that he can't employ escorts...)

And for the second part: CHEATING? We don't cheat here, do we? No, please!

[Dr. Nil]

The L-Crate Hauler is quite fast for a ship capable of hauling up to 165t (it was made that way in order to keep the transit time on the escort missions somewhat reasonable). I decided that the only way to balance the player version would be to make it incapable of having lasers mounted.

But whether it's a worse cheat to edit the shipdata file than to buy one of the uberships out there is really a matter of taste.

I never got around to making a HUD with fluffy dice for the L-Crate Hauler, so perhaps the dealership installed lasers to compensate for this