My SEV Ship Mod...

[Jarena]

I really like this idea (especially the hull bonuses for ship types, I think that's really cool)
The one thing I'd like to see in this mod is a reworking of the ship construction tech tree. The SEV demo one didn't make sense to me. Instead I propose expanding the theoretical aspect of ship design, as such:
Theoretical: Ship Construction L1
leads to
Applied: Frigate Construction
Applied: Colony Ship Construction
Applied: Light Freighter Construction
Theoretical: Ship Construction L2
leads to
Applied: Destroyer Construction
and so on and so forth

This way, one's ship hulls can adapt to play style. You can strike out for the DN quickly, but you'll have small expensive hulls. Or you can take the slow progression and have cheap efficient hulls as you work your way up. You can even specialize (big carriers and fast destroyers, say)

This could be applied to the fighter tree as well:
Theoretical: Strikecraft (or somethingng)
leads to
Applied: Carrier Hulls
Applied: Fighter Hulls
(where, say,: L1 = SFighter I
L2 = Sfighter II
L3 = Sfighter III, Mfighter I, and so on and so forth)

This, again, conforms to your playing style
Lowtech carrier + hitech fighters vs the opposite gives you:
A smaller number of powerful fighters (X-Wings?)
vs a huge number of cheap throwaway fighters (TIE fighters?)

Drones and troops, I think, could be kept like stock SEV, because they don't have dedicated deployment methods like carriers - unless, say, you added in a dropship class? (fast troop transports with +armor and +pd?)

As a last thought, would you ramp up the hull special bonuses? IE Destroyer I would give, say +1 speed, whereas Destroyer IV gives +4? Might be a way to keep smaller hulls valuable and researched late-game.

[Ed Kolis]

How are you supposed to give hulls differing numbers of hitpoints, given that hulls in all the Space Empires games (well, except the first one ) have hitpoints only by virtue of the components installed on them?

[Suicide Junkie]

Mounts would do.

Just give the components all the same hp/kt and scale that up as desired with a mount.

[Matryx]

Innate armour in the hulls?
Sure, it's not totally exact (components will still add to armour)... also not 100% sure what abilities we can mod in

[Captain Kwok]

There is actually an entry in the vehiclesize.txt file for structure amount, but I don't think it's being used.

[Phoenix-D]

I can't test it, since that file won't allow modding in the demo, but it doesn't look like its being used.

[Captain Kwok]

It isn't being used.

[Phoenix-D]

Captain Kwok said:
It isn't being used.

Did you test it or just assume? Because I've found several features you assumed weren't working that actually were.

(I doubt this is one of them, though)