I'm sure at least ONE other person has thought of this, but i don't know nor do i care if it's been brought up before. What I'm proposing is increasing the hull of most ships (Less noticeable in larger classes) but in turn splitting that hull in two. (With ONE exception, slaves would maintain the current single-hull as a drawback to being slaves, Reason: Trade slave light fighters would be broken in efficiency).

These two hull types, lets call them Active and Inactive Hull for now.

Active Hull: Defines current/max hull of usable/equipped items, this results in effectively balancing the hull of equipped and usable items on the class without hindering its ability to store items. Usable items meaning tweaks, fighters, unequipped drones, etc.

Inactive Hull: Defines current/max hull of the ships storage bay, cause think about it, when you equip your shield, engines, energybank and weaponry all that shit doesnt just sit in your storage bay does it? if it does, that's one fucked up ship.

This would probably take time on the dev's side but lets ignore that factor for now. This would fix many problems people have when playing lower hull classes- especially solo. Not everyone has a second account with an engi waiting to pick up that valuable but huge item that drops off of a Boss/Uber. Not everyone wants to constantly be in a squad either and this would make more sense considering currently everything is just lugged together in one big storage bay (or small bay) even while equipped- i mean, screw logic. i'm just gunna use this laser magically out of my storage bay cause apparently it doesn't blow a hole in my ship.

Thoughts?

Makes a lot of sense.

I like it.
Makes sense.
But since when was that a reason to do something.

Signed, something should be done about it

Yes please!

just realized something i missed. shall edit main post with this aswell.

Slaves: Would maintain current hull mechanics, else LF trade slaves would become stupidly efficient compred to freighters and such.

Bump, would really like a devs input.

Would make cargobays (hull expanders) make much more sense, if they contributed to cargo space instead of working hull space (where stuff is going on).

Ultimately, I like the idea, but I'm not sure, due to the amount of work rebalancing all the ships for the change, unless someone came up with some simple working formulae to derive a certain amount of cargo hull to working hull.

I'd also suggest the addition that cargo could overflow into working; I'd imagine the upshot of this is most ships would have less cargo than working hull, which could get very annoying when first setting up a ship (think Berserker but for every class).

Another thought occurred to me that'd cause a few issues:
What about if your working hull is full, and you get a solar panel as a drop, or a tweak?


This'd require a lot of server side changes at various points for hull checks, not to mention various UI tweaks (inventories and hull space widget) to add in, so definitely a lot of work.

Totally worth it though. I still hate the fact DGing and killing random stuff is less profitable on my SD simply because I'm not able to scoop the stuff that drops. It's just frustrating

I figure the panel would go into storage, thats just imo though. the tweak you wouldn't be able to grab i guess, its just my assumption that being able to hold tweaks and use them from your storage is a bit odd and would be unbalanced with a change/increase to hull. I can see the annoyance it would cause to rebalance every ship in the game around this but there's a lot more things than just hull that could be changed for the better- this is just one of the more immediate annoyances to players, and most other things you could rebalance would take far longer I'd reckon.

Going to revive this actually, because it seems like this really is a reasonable suggestion. To add to the OP, could make it so any usable items in the inactive Hull are unusable, solar panels can't be equipped and tweaks can't be consumed for example, and you can't freely move them from inactive to active Hull without either staying out of combat for awhile I figure, or limit to only done while docked.

Edit: I'm going to make a suggestions vote for this, and I'm totally aware this would take lots of time to accomplish, but it'd make the game a whole lot easier on solo players, and often times new players ARE solo players, and don't have any teams or friends backing them up with high Hull ships.

So you would not be allowed to use a tweak you just scooped, even if it was tossed to you by a teammate? There are some problems with this implementation.

Not quite, ordinarily usable items would go to active Hull by default, UNLESS you don't have any room in your active Hull.

To be honest, I'd forum PM Jey about it and ask him how feasible it'd be before adding it on the suggestion system.

Currently our code structure doesn't support multiple inventories in a single husk (item storing object, like a drone, station, spaceship etc), at least as far as I'm aware (I don't tend to need knowledge that low level, heh).

Too late lol, but I'll throw a pm his way pointing him here anyways.