Colony Fighters!

[Ed Kolis]

All right, here's an idea that probably won't work, but it came up when my brother complained that in every 4X game he's played, whenever you colonize a planet, the colony ship is destroyed... "Why can't they just push the houses out the door?" he says... so I thought about it for a minute and came up with an idea for a mod - Make colony components mountable only on fighters. Make a REALLY HUGE fighter that carries these components. Give this fighter -200 to hit and defense so no one's tempted to use it to attack people with. (Might make good chaff though...) Now, make a special component for colony ships that is a really big fighter bay.

Only problems I can see are fighters can't carry cargo so all colonies would start with zero population, but actually that's kind of realistic because 1M is a lot of people to start a colony with, and besides, you could always put some cargo bays on the mothership anyway... and also that fighters might not be able to be given the colonize command (I know it doesn't work for drones...)