Suggestion: 'Reverse Armor'

[Promotheus]

Please consider the name a bit of a place holder, I've used it as it fairly accurately describes the mechanics of what I would like to suggest.

Basically it would be several different tiers of the same item, much like CAU's, but instead of buffing a ships hull at the cost of cargo space it would lower the hull and
increase cargo space.

I expect this would heavily influence a lot of different parts of the game as a whole and will try to identify the ones I forsee below:

• Cargo ships in particular would likely use this to up their profit, this would lead to more credits being in circulation as well as larger/squishier targets for pirates to target. Increasing both the risk and reward of flying said ships.
  
• Escort vessels might start charging more (and actually get used more) as well as they now have a more fragile target to protect and might start scouting ahead, meaning the cargo ships would stay in a system longer if they expect a pirate ahead which in turn gives the pirate time to catch up if needed.
  
• Trade balancing; I mostly expect this will influence freighter routes rather then transport routes as they tend to have the more valuable/exotic shorter routes and percentagewise I think their cargo would increase the most.
  
• Trade events: I have no idea how it is decided what amount of cargo is needed for an event, perhaps a PoB buy limit? At any rate with such an item people would be faster in reaching set goals, meaning the goals might have to be put higher.
  

Now every idea has concerns or potential issues that need to be addressed to prevent problems as much as you can. I've only been able to think of two so far which are:

• CAU vs UAC (see what I did there?) concerns. I think the easiest way to avoid any issues with this is making them use the same slot so it is impossible to equip a CAU in combination with this item.
  
• 5kers snowballing into the realm of the absurd. I think the solution here would be to give the item a fixed amount of cargo to boost instead of using a multiplier. Perhaps the highest/most expensive version of the item could add somewhere between 700-1000 (ballpark number, I am not a trade dev nor do I pretend to have extensive trade route knowledge), making it very interesting for freighters that want to trade but still remain valuable for transports without going completely overboard.
  

Now I do think this item, if it does get implemented, should be nowhere near as expensive as the CAU's. People would already be making themselves far more suseptable to pirates after all. I could even see the Houses outlawing its use above a certain tier on liners to ensure the safety of the people on board (which could lead to more interesting roleplay if different houses have different standards on what they consider acceptable safety).

On a final note: I came up with the idea so it is of course entirely possible I'm overlooking any glaring issues that i haven't addressed in this post, if this is the case please feel free to point them out below and I will try to update the post accordingly.