Should there be more unique ships?

[aerelm]

I've always had a mixed feeling when it comes to unique ships. On one hand, they are a good flavor to the game, but on the other they often turn into "unnecessary addition" after some time which can't be removed or replaced because they still may be in use on other servers.

The ultimate solution would be introducing a system similar to the one we use for Player Faction IDs right now, which would allow the mod to use unique ships and grant them to individuals and factions, but once they get bored and leave the game, allow the ships to be recycled and replaced without much hassle. Main challenge though, would be designing and implementing such system. Once and if that's done, unique ships can be added without having to worry about ending up with a ton of unused ships which each have their own individual owner InRP and can't be reused for another concept.

The current disadvantage of unique ships is that they get used by one player, then he either gets bored or gets too caught up with RL to play, and the ships end up just occupying mod space without having any actual use. Later on another player may show up with a solid enough idea to reuse the ship for another concept, but no matter what, long as it's the same ship it would not fit the new character as good as a unique ship should. i.e. they turn into shiny toys which everyone wants but no one can get. Same has happened with each and every unique ship in the mod at least at one point since they were added, and same has even happened with ships and equipment added for closed factions. Phantom tech is a clear example to prove even giving them to a faction won't be a 100% guarantee of ships being used indefinitely and not ending up as dead and forbidden tech, and recently we had another one of such factions disbanding, with the talks of it tech turning into a pseudo-phantom situation.

If there is a functioning system proposed to prevent such cases, I'm sure most of the staff who're skeptical about the idea of unique ships will let the idea fly, if they know each new ship added would be easily recyclable and won't turn into another unused "legacy ship".