Since everyone is hauling passengers

[ferongr]

I think that cargopods, as attractive as they are were refused because there is something tricky with setting them up. Because they arent actually part of the ship, but are rather flying in formation with ship.

Cargopods are implemented as shield generators (shields have a model). Basically, the cargo pods are shields with 0 regen and cap that are assigned the cargopod model (that has an HpConnect hardpoint). The shield (cargo) slots on the ship are assigned the HpCargo hardpoint.

It's quite easy to create noew pods, provided you model them at the same dimensions of vanilla ones, and assign the hardpoint correctly.

In this fashion, we can create other modifications (visual customization elements like spoilers, extra lights, wings, tanks etc) for any kind of ship, provided we set up the hardpoints and make sure the models fit together nicely. There was a proof-of-concept mod somewere that showed this

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