I realize we’re getting a big update in a day but in the future I would love to see a Ships log that keeps a log of things like:
Date of production
Name of the pilot that produced the ship (or NPC issued)
Date the ship changed hands and to whom (purchased, traded, or boarded)
Total # of other ships destroyed regardless of who owned it at the time (in addition to the kill marks)
This could give some ships a “classic” status for simply being so old and it could be interesting to see a list of previous owners too. This additional data could offer more depth in a number of ways, for example: a ship may have greater sell value if a popular person owned it previously. Did you loan your ship out… did it come back with a history of mystery pilots instead of just the person you loaned it to? Did someone steal your ship and then sell it - it would be possible to identify it and the person that stole it. Additional data could be added too, such as a flight log, but that might open a can of worms.
I know a mate of mine named omar used to make “organic” incursisis (?).
He’d scavenge the materials from bears he’d flip in the wild and build replacement ships for himself to go flipping further bears.
It was all rather longwinded and i bit unsettling like,
But you could trace the kill mails for the mtu’s and ships the stuff came from.
I call my ship’s log “Journal” and write in it fairly regularly. I either purchase or manufacture all my ships so I’ve never owned a ship with a “History” other than mine, and yeah, some of those Histories have been pretty damned short.
The problem with it is the assembly/repackage mechanic. When you build a ship you never build A ship. You build a STACK of ships. Even if it’s a stack of 1, it’s still not actually a ship until it’s assembled and then it stops being one when it’s repackaged. The reasoning behind this is for the database. Instead of having a bazillion database entries, one for every item, you have a single database entry for a bazillion items. Each item in a stack doesn’t exist, so there’s nothing to attach a log or a history or a makers mark or anything to.
Usually with this idea, people want a log of ownership, including the maker. So yes, the feature would completely fail to preserve the information people are wanting.
Yeah. But you can go with “limited” edition of it based on “repackaging cleans the log”. Use systems like ship fitting or name as basic. Only one thing is needed: “hand-made” building when built ship appears already “packaged” and can only be build with amount of 1. Something like that.
Not really something fantastic.
Alternatively each stack and item can have a new database entry assigned called “manufacturer_ID” which means even if someone produces a stack of ships they still can have the same such ID (the entire stack) as they all have the same ID. When a ship is assembled it inherits the ID. So far so good.
Depending on how complex CCP want to go either…
a) simple solution: when repackaged the ID is cleared and the ship becomes a generic ship without manufacturer ID.
b) complex solution: if a new stack is created (ship packaged) it inherits the ID. If another stacked ship(s) is/are dragged to an existing stack of ship(s) and the IDs match then the new combined stack inherits the ID. If the IDs differ a pop-up asks if you want to combine the stacks which will result in the ID be cleared thus the ship stack becoming a generic stack.
(This way if the more complex solution is implemented even stacked ships can be reassembled and keep the ID as long as each stack has the same ID, so different manufacturers can be kept as a different stack to preserve the ID and thus enable assembling and repackaging without losing the manufacturer ID.)
Edit: Note that this only works for the manufacturer’s name problem, though combined with a log for assembled ships only it could work still even if only the simpler solution is implemented on the condition earlier brought up that once a ship is repackaged the log is lost. (So only assembled ships have logs but still they can have a separate manufacturer ID which could even be preserved between repackaging even if the log is lost.)
