Thank you all for your input. Your comments are noted.
"Balancing" these ships is an ongoing process, seeing as they are Vanilla. We had a few rounds yesterday and the Dragons did indeed have the upper hand but it's not much of a difference. We have left out the re-enagagement rule so people were just relaunching after being destroyed. It was a nice experience to have a fight where no one was worried about people breaking rules. The mechanics prevented it.
If you do get killed, you can either respawn and launch without regens or just do a restart. At quiet times, people chose the latter. When the server is busy you risk losing your place on the server so people seem to choose the formner option. Every bot counts.
You'll notice the Dragon restart is equipped with less than maximum bots. Both ships have the same powercore - the Dragon has been downgraded to a Bret HF core. Adding an armour upgrade to the Crusader is something we are looking at. I don't think anyone could really be bothered to use this as a easy way to make cash - the re-sell value is hardly worth it, and the being kicked from the server for each restart means many folks won't be bothered. Besides everyone and his dog has a Mark 8 on their ships so a few Mark 1's aren't going to upset the economy.
One other thing - if you can't handle a Mk 1 event where nothing is at stake, find another hobby. The idea is to have a bit of fun and organise impromptu events and fights with a little roleplay that is easy for everyone to attend, and to provide a forum for the occasional low stakes combat without travelling to Connecticutt. This is supposed to be an ongoing event, representing the lives of the "little people" caught up in the war.
If you are so annoyed by participating in something like this that you feel compelled to post angrily and without anything positive and constructive to address your grievances here, you are beyond any help I can offer you.
