Hello. Here are some suggestions regarding the ship building.
1)Introduce the possibility of ship upgrades. This has been already suggested. It would be a kind of shipyard job. One would be able to replace some components by some other version and the material cost would be the full cost of the new component. One would also get back a pecentage of the material cost of the old component. Moreover, there is compensation : if some of the old mats are used for the new component, they should be injected into the construction instead of being given back to the player. To get the mats back, a player would need an inventory on the same planet. However, it should be impossible to change the type of plates. For instance, one would be able to increase the cargo bay by adding more plates, but one could not replace the BHPs by LHPs.
2)Introduce the ship disassemble. One would be able to disassemble a ship in a shipyard and get back a percentage of the used mats. To get the mats back, a player would need an inventory on the same planet.
3)Introduce ship trade. One would be able to post special sell ads for ships on the local market, including the LM on CX. To post an ad, one needs to possess the ship. There would be a list of all owned ships from which one choses when creating the ad. The characteristics of the ship (size of the cargo, type of plates, shielding, etc.) would be publically displayed in the ad. To fulfill a sell, the ship should be stationed on the same planet as the LM. Its cargo and fuel tanks should be empty, and the ship should be repaired to 100 percent. Also, the buyer should have at least one free ship slot (see point 5). This mechanic would create a secondary market for ships and some corps could specialize into shipbuilding.
4)The two starting ships should be impossible to trade or disassemble. A company would permanently own these two. This is to prevent new players being lured into selling their initial ships or doing other mistakes. However, it should still be possible to upgrade these two ships.
5)Introduce ship slots similar to base slots. There would be a miximum on the total number of ships that a company can have and it would depend on the HQ level. This is to prevent a company snowballing and becoming dominant through logisitics. Initially, one would have 5 ship slots, 2 of which occupied by the initial ships. This is to accomadate the gameplay of traders who do not own bases. They could still acquire 3 additional ships. After that, one would get one additional slot every 2 or 3 levels of the HQ. To get rid of a ship and get one free slot back, one could either disassemble the ship in a shipyard (point 2) or sell it on the LM (point 3).
6)Allow corporation-owned shipyards. This would be a corp project, similar to the corp HQ, and would use one slot on a planet. The corp shipyard should have the same construction cost as the public shipyard, and all the characteristics like the cost and the duration of the shipbuilding should be the same. So a planet could have several shipyards, one public and several corp shipyards for different corps. The corp members would be all allowed to use the corp shipyard. The non-members could still use a corp shipyard, but they would first need to get a permission from the corp for that. This would further emphasize the idea of corps specializing in the shipbuilding (see point 3), and would introduce room for interesting diplomacy, as one would need to be on good terms with a corp to use their shipyard.
7)There should be fees for using shipyards (shipbuilding, upgrading, disassembling). The fees paid should be proportional to the job duration. The fees should have two components, denoted here A and B. Component A is the public tax. Its level is fixed by the governor of the planet (or the senate of the planet in the future) and it applies to all shipyards on the planet, public and corporate. The tax is paid to the governing entity. The component B is shipyard specific. Its level for a public shipyard is fixed by the governor/senate and it is paid to the governing entity. For a corp shipyard, its level is determined by the corp and it’s paid to the corp, and redistributed among corp members through dividends. There could actually be two rates for B, one for corp members, and a different one for non-member companies. This would incentivise the corp to allow its shipyard being used by non-member companies and earn money from this.
I believe that these changes would create exciting endgame mechanics around shipbuilding and ship trading and should not be too difficult to implement. I would be happy to discuss with other PrUn players and the devs on these mechanics and know their opinion.