wander

I appreciate the work people put into beautiful ship designs on the workshop. When getting my friend into the game, they really helped him enormously. I've just found workshop ships really hard to edit, let alone upgrade. My friend largely gave up trying to edit his ship, he just made it bigger and strapped extra things to the outside. Most steam workshop designs aren't modular at all. They're not designed to be something you can upgrade, or even edit really. Replacing internal components is tough, chiefly due to the difficulty of getting the camera to do what you want. For example, try selecting a block deep inside a ship. Its hard. You have to find some angle and zoom where you can get close enough through the ship to select it. Forget simply moving your camera freely - that, as far as I am aware, doesn't exist, and it should. In some of my avorion play sessions, the camera has given me more trouble than groups of enemy ships. If the game simply let us move the camera however we wanted, ship design would be much easier.

I've always built my ships in a cube shape, for one simple reason. Cube-shaped ships are easier to edit, in particular, easier to upgrade. If I want to attach, say, a hangar to one of the ships I see on the steam workshop, I might as well scrap the ship and use a different one. But with a cube-shaped ship, its perfectly doable. Cube-shaped ships are modular, you can easily swap out bits, upgrade things, etc. That is THE reason I use cube ships. Not any of this stuff about surface-area-to-volume ratio, or armor plat HP, or similar. Simple ease of editing. If you want to discourage cube-shaped ships, then you need to make it easier to edit/refit/upgrade ships. Start out by giving us better control of the editing camera. Editing something inside my ship should not be so hard. Alternatively, forget about the idea of making ships pretty. Avorion is a primarily single-player game. Even in multiplayer, the universe is vast, and I will never see most other players' ship. How ships look doesn't really matter. Practical concerns are vastly more important. We're building warships here, not luxury liners.