I find it strange that a planet can build drones, which are physically larger than Escorts, but cannot build an Escort without a shipyard. How about a new setting for shipyards -- max vehicle size. Planetary abilities would be set by defaults in settings.txt of course, and then you could have 'small ship yards' that can build anything up to 50 tons for small units (troops and fighters), up to 150 or 200 tons for satellites and drones, and then actually have MORE levels of full-scale shipyards with increasing max tonnage ability for major ship construction.
A nice side effect of this would be that planets could build small ships, escorts and frigates, so you could do things like build scouts or errand-runner type ships (medical bay?
) without tying up your main shipyards. Actually, in my modded config the escort is 200 kt so you could have planets able to build only units by setting the default planet max build size to less than that. This could open the way to a new racial ability, too. Increased shipyard capacity that would let you build larger ships than the default for your shipyard type.
[ 05 February 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]