Hey Lindsey, to put what we talked about on IRC (Freelancer lazy ship design philosophy and similarity of design of various ships within one faction) in a more coherent shape, here's an
imgur album with FL ships, and also some points about ships design in general which might or might not be of help (especially when it comes to building more...believable tech):
- re-using ship hulls and other parts may be lazy, but is constantly done IRL. Designing everything from scratch is time- and resource- consuming, and comes with its own set of 'childhood problems' to solve. It's always better to stick an old-and-tried solution
unless you need to change some parameter rather dramatically, which leads us to...
- tech continuity breaks - when you really need to step up your game, you design parts from the scratch. For example, if you want a much better armour, you usually need a different hull. Outer bits and pieces (engines, stabilisers, wings and other sticking-out bits) might remain the same.
- form follows function. And the function of the fighter is to, well, fight. If it has very, very large frontal cross-section, it'd be much easier to hit, making designs
like this one not particularly viable
However, ships that are not designed with fighting in mind (mining, exploration, cargo) can indeed have a large frontal cross-section.
And of course, awesome work, can't really stop being amazed at how good those ships look!
Survivor of the Josh Parnell Blackout of 2015.
Ship models will get re-used when players (human or otherwise) use blueprints to build them. If these ships are bad, and the owners of the ships get killed, that will lead to those ships disappearing from the market. The value of blueprints may lead to their being copied and purchased by others, so if the survivability of these ships is tracked and tied to the blueprint's value, that may lead to natural selection by itself. I'm not sure whether it will actually work that way or not, though.
