What if all ship hulls were accessible from the beginning of the game?
I know that sounds like a crazy idea, but what about in mods like Proportions where smaller ships have their own advantages (better to-hit chances, defense bonuses, maintenance reduction) - it doesn't seem right to spend hundreds of thousands of research points to get a hull that's intrinsically no better than the ones you have already?
OK, you say, doesn't it take some sort of advanced engineering to build larger ships? Fine, then don't eliminate the research cost altogether, just set it to, say, 2000 instead of 5000.
This idea would work well with SJ's spaceyard expansions - it would kind of work like MOO3's "shipyard capacity" in which the size of ships you can build at a planet is determined by the number of shipyards you have on the planet or something like that, only this way you can build any size ship at any planet, it just takes a real long time to build a big ship at a planet with only a few shipyards...
(Hmm, I wonder if spaceyard expansions work as components as well as facilities... that would be a cool feature for P&N or other mods
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