[Fyron]

They can be kept then. If you have 1000 ships which are named like Devastator 0001, Devastator 0002 etc. it's very easy to compress those names quite effectively. Personaly I don't need the names and it's annoying to see the ship's name instead of class when you click a sector containing enemy ships. If ships are retrofitted you have to click each one to know its class.

That would be your opinion then, which is not shared by a large percentage of the player base. The scrap window should have organization options rather than just order built, which will eliminate that problem nicely.

I don't understand this. You can't see the damage of ships if they move out of scanner range so why you have to see it when you move out of the system?

Perhaps. Then, I would suggest that that data be stored somewhere with a date marker until the next time you scan the ships, even if they are in the same system as your ships still.

Besides the damage is useful only 2-3 turns because then the ships are repaired.

In stock... do not forget about mods, which are what make this game great to a large percentage of its players (dare I say a majority? ).

There's no point to store the status of each component, 99% of components aren't broken so it's better to list only broken components.

Umm... yeah. A bool for whether it is damaged or not is the best method. An array of damaged indices is not that good of a solution.

If it's the same ships you can just add second coordinates to ships' data, which means only one byte more.

Unless the name changes. Or the damage changes. So, you would have to store that info more than once for each ship when you see them in mutliple systems.

If ship data is too much what about planet data. Even Fyron have to admit that storing planets' data can't take much space. Ships are moving quite a lot so that's not very useful information.

No, planet data would not take that much more space. 19 more bytes per planet, to tell whether each other empire can see the flag or not. Unless, of course, you want to keep more accurate views of the planet values and names. Why can you scan a system that you have visited at some point, but can see no data at all on planets in systems you have been to? Some scanning would be necessary to justify seeing changes in name and values.

This is offtopic but was MM informed that long range scanned ships doesn't come to "enemy ships designs"?

No idea. I believe they did back in SE3, but that ability was lost in SE4. I am sure someone has mentioned it in all this time. But, sending it to MM will make him aware that it is an issue to more players.