Ok this is a rough idea that i thought of earlier.
What if it was possible for there to be a design for each faction, like a faction symbol. For example the Keepers mark or the dragons dragon. And make it available for purchase as a paint job tag. Like airplane fighter pilots would have on the noses of their planes.
Make it a commodity or somthing. Similar principles to the cargo pod.
I saw someone else propose an idea like this somewhere, and it makes perfect sense to me.
The only important things I can see are;
1; making sure that certain logos are only sold on appropriate bases to people with the correct rep
2; setting up a class and hardpoint size system similar to the weapons so that you couldnt mount a logo for a capship on a starflea.
something I wouldn't mind seeing is faction specific colors and patterns for various factions to use on civilian ships, like the Eagle or Starblazer. You could do it as a mountable thing like a cargo pod, and make it specific for each civvie ship class.
It would be a lot of work, but I think it would be cool.
Like Gemini, I remember a thread that talked about this very thing, & apparently it IS possible, but I don't remember why it didn't get off the ground.
House ships already have the symbol of there house on it, on some vessels it's integrated into the vessels very hull, so I would suggest restricting this to generic vessels. (Civy, border worlds, ex.)
I think the main problem would be the scale and applying it to every ship in disco. Which if you think about it it may seem easy but im not sure if it may be one of those really difficult things where you have to realter it for every ship or not.
Well, in Theory there is a decently blank spot of a generally similar size for each size class of ship.
As for having decals on House ships, I was thinking similar to the way USAF planes get the logo of their squadron emblazoned on the tail.
Civvy/Generic ships could have two logo slots, for a faction logo and for a generic flight group logo, and House ones could come with just a flight group logo.
If you wanted to get uber-fancy, civvy/border worlds/any other generic ships could have entire ship specific new paint jobs in addition to their logo slots.
Another option is to make faction-specific variants of certain ships with slightly edited stats to reflect their faction affiliation (IE say the Unioners increase the power to their Unioner-Hawk-Refit but that subtracts some armor) an edited paint job and pre-set logo and a single slot for a flight group emblem like house ships.
Then the generic ones would still have their two availible slots.
Realistically speaking, a simple logo isnt hard. A 2D plane mesh with a transparency enabled logo on it, hardpointed 1 millionth of a mm above a flat spot on the hull. Bingo.
You have generic sizes, say 3 or 4, and a few dozen logos, so about 100-something simple models, a few dozen textures.... The most tedious part would be hardpoint equipping. hours and hours and hours of alignment and re-alignment.
My guess is that it would never happen unless someone experienced and capable (in hardpointing) volunteers to join the team and do it for the next version after 4.85.
Theres certainly enough graphical talent and team/faction logo projects to draw on for the actual artwork, and to model the objects themselves simply requires the modeler to work out a general set of size brackets and constantly make, orient, hardpoint equip, and texture a bunch of flat planes.
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