[Puke]

i see, similar to mech customization in games like mechwarior, and earthseige, where custom weapons show up on the hulls.

i think this would be hard to do for a small devlopment house, and if it was done, would end up looking blocky and clunky.

as for the UI design, i agree that moveable windows that follow general MS Windows API concepts (such as PgDn moving one screenload, and clicking on the scroll bar (not button) moving one screenload, and wheel mouse support) would be usefull.

I am not sure how usefull a graphical tech tree would be, there would be lots of crossing lines, since it is moddable and will have to be generated on the fly based on whatever techtree people want to load in.

I am also not so sure about the ship overlay thing. One idea I had for this, was to have blocks available on an overlay for component TYPES. then you could expand these blocks to put in as many of any that type of component (controll components, weapons, armor, engines, whatever) that you need. this would avoid having to scroll over the ship image, which i think defeats the purpose of having fixed spots overlaid on an image. It would also give you all the space you need.

It would also, optionally, allow for higher detail on ship designs. perhaps you could have both starboard and port weapons bays, each which can hold any number of weapons (or perhaps limit what each block of component types can hold) and has different hit probabilities in combat. maybe different armor facings, or armor could aply globlay. of course, this is totally not required.

I would like to see most of the UI effort put into systems and planet displays. I would like for systems either to be very detailed with moving parts, and varying orbital periods, OR, i would like to see them abstracted into static, liniar, displays of the major objects in the system, possibly seperated into inner system, outer system, and maybe a rim/gateway area where ships enter from or where WPs hang out.

Planet displays could be given some work, as well. I wont go into too many details, but more effort could be put into them, with the number of fields available. alot of these are code suggestions, and not UI ones. maybe diamater, density (which in turn calculate gravity) and distance from star (which in turn calculates orbital diamater) maybe display orbital space for each body, so objects in a sector (if the sector concept is kept) could either be in deep space, in orbit of a planet, or in orbit of a moon)

before i get carried away, i will shut up.