Barge use in the modern age.

[Haste]

The only real way to realistically let the ship keep its laning ability - which is easy enough to re-enable - would be to drastically cut into the ship's cargo capacity. I'd expect to have to bring it down to 10,000 or so. It'd end up not too different from how it is right now in terms of viability. Fundamentally I believe removing laning makes more sense if we believe in the ship's infocard, which hints at the ship operating in very remote regions. It still excels there, for the record. A simple division of cargo space by cruise speed shows you that objectively the barge can move more cargo per hour off the lanes than a 5k could. Sure, the long charge time reduces the margin a bit, but the Barge objectively is not a bad ship.

Of course we're aware that lanes were one of the ways to comfortably pass through asteroid fields and that is now less doable, but still ultimately not that bad. The Barge fortunately moves so very slowly that it also has quite a bit of time to move out of the way of (small) rocks.

I can see us doing something with the ship in the longer term to make it more appealing, like the often-suggested refinery features. It's not a terrible idea. It does have a lot of issues that'd have to be ironed out, like the fact that PoBs can be destroyed and are "always online" whereas a barge can just be F1'd in space instead and is not lost on death.

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