I find it very bad, if you upgrade your ship, that you do not get the old parts back. In reality everybody would keep old parts an sell ist again.
I agree that this makes work in the game. So whats about a Dissassembling line in Ship Building where you get the parts back but loose some of them or have to feed it with some goods for the work.
After this you can assamble the ship with the new parts an have your old one back. Disadvantage would be the cost of deassembling an the time the ship is in the docks. Perhabs dissassembling takes a week or so - so that its not the best opinion in every case.
The thing I am not happy about my idea would be how to solve the problem - Beginnership → Dissassembling → making money, give it to sb an than leave the game.
A solution could be speacial marked items that are not sellable on the cx / market. But I think in the programming code this could be very difficult to solve
The problem is no worse than the existing situation where a new player can sell all their starting materials and transfer the money to someone else. What prevents it is that LM contracts are only available to paid accounts.
I think that being able to disassemble a ship into parts, just as you can disassemble a building into parts, is a great idea and should part of the “ship trading” additions to the game.
In fact, I would assume it’s already in the devs’ plans. If you can’t disassemble ships, then ship trader wouldn’t be a viable career path, because you could end up with a load of useless ships that nobody wants to buy and you can’t get rid of.
I don’t know if it’s in any official published roadmap, but in previous threads about how ship trading could work, the devs have participated, and I’ve had at least two posts about ship trading that were “liked” by members of the dev team. So I must conclude that they don’t hate the idea.