[Andrés]

I'd like to see components that consumed cargo every time they were used. For example:

Shipborne construction yards which turn a type of Cargo (call them 'Crated' Fighters) into workable fighters. So you build crated fighters en-masse at your homeworlds, then ship them out to the front for assembly (obviously crated fighters take less cargo space per unit).

Engines that consume 'Fuel' cargo. Weapons (i.e. missiles) that consume 'Ammo' cargo. Resupplying a ship can be done at a resupply base, or by having it link up with a 'fuel tender'/'ammo collier', and transferring the cargo.

Can this be done already? I think it can't, but I'm still impressed with what people mod.

Then what we need are several types of supplies (moddable so you may add as needed).
Here you have some examples.

1-Fuel: used by engines and reactors
2-Energy: used by most ship systems and energy weapons
3-Spare parts/raw materials: used by repair bays and shipyards.
4-Ammo: used by balistic weapons and seekers, maybe an specific type for most weapons (thoug there may be a few that share the same type of ammo)
5-Foodstuff and consumables: used by the crew and population on a ship

Some components allow to convert supplies between specific types: e.g. reactors fuel > energy
And there may be specific componets to hold each (tanks, batteries, etc.)

All types of supplies can be transfered between ships as cargo.

A quantum reactor may still generate limitless energy but you will still run out of some types of supplies and will need to resupply or have them ferried.

I like the idea that manteinance cost (at least most of it) is actually the cost of the supplies the ships consume.

There are specialized factories building each type, but you don't need to micro-manage all distribution, like in resource extraction all you need is a space port. Then all you need to do is take your ship to a resupply depot and as long as you have enough in your empire stockpiles, your ship will be resupplied.

Stackable Shipyards, ie, if I want to build a base on a wormhole I could have 4 shipyard ships combine themselves to get it done faster (or even if a portion of each shipyard could be added to the whole project....).

I actually want SE3-like construct/repair queues, and my good old multiple SY bases with multiple queues.
But it would be interesting to be able to build large ship/bases in a similar way to ring/sphere worlds: multiple yards making parts that are then assembled into the finished ship.


PDC I don't like PDC not able to shoot at ships. I understand weapons that can't shoot at fighters, or at least that have no chance of hitting them, but what about weapons that can shoot fighters but not capital ships.
What we need is a better scaling of weapon damage, PDC can shoot anything, but it only does significant damage to something small and fragile like a fighter or a missile. And its neglectable for large ships.