Modular Equipment System

[Reeves]

This is going to be a little messy, pun intended, mostly because I just thought it up.

So I've flown snubs primarily over the time I've been here and I've looked back over the screenshots of my ships that I have from then till now and one thing that has never changed was the fact that my ships always seemed to follow a common set-up in regards to mines. I would always have a CD, CM and a nuke mine, there was no point doing anything else due to obvious draw-backs. But what if we had these drawbacks while still allowing people who largely fly alone a little versatility with some tactical disadvantages?

Give me a small amount of your patience and consider these examples:

1) Duelists, they exist and usually engage in small-scale skirmishes with one or two hostile fighters. This is a legitimate choice in play style but it can have drawbacks under the MES. A duelist, say one who flies an Avenger or any other duel oriented ship can mount a combination of an MR/Maxim/Missile(only one of these, obviously), CD and Nuke mine, but they accomplish this at the cost of CMs. Meaning if this big stronk man finds himself in a group fight and has missiles actively pursuing his posterior, he's probably going to die without serious help. They aren't feasible for extended group combat this way, though there's no way for me to formulate around exceptional skill if someone's able to consistently dodge missiles.

2) The supportive group fighter or chaser, both of which are seen in larger scale and even mixed ship-class fights. We're going to use the beautiful Guardian as the benchmark example here, not to say any other ship of the VHF class would be unable to accomplish this if set up right. The chaser Guardian would be set up as follows, a missile to make sure that even fancy flying doesn't negate damage output, a CD to make sure their target can't flee and a CM to make sure they don't take missile damage themselves or get CD'd while firing their missiles. But they do this at the cost of having mines, which does two things, it eliminates a unique damage aspect and it also lessens the risk of a chaser nuking their own team-mates.

This is mainly to give people who want a little freedom in how they equip their ships that exact fundamental liberty, but without giving them perfect choice. The previous iteration of a similar system was the Auxiliary system, which allowed load-outs like MR, CD, CM and nukes to exist on one ship. While I think the concept behind that system was rather creative, it wasn't balanced. A craft should only be able to mount so many utility systems before the chassis says "Bruh!".

Jokes aside, I'm interested to know what the dev-feedback and user thoughts would be like on a system that both empowers and counter-balances your effectiveness like this.

EDIT: I imagine this would work best using the old method of auxiliary weapon mounting, just to avoid the awkwardness of having an MR that faces backwards because it's being mounted on the CM slot or something funny.
Essentially, this would work using a set of equipment values, via FL Hook. You have 3 slots, so three coded slots, mounting an MR in place counts as 1/3, a CD as 2/3 and a nuke mine as 3/3, meaning FL Hook would not allow you to mount a CM. I'm unsure of the technical side of how this would work, but I hope something along these lines is possible with current development methods.

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