After playing a bit around with the fitting window and the capabilities of saving and loading fittings, i found the functionality lacking in some areas and information provided to be plain wrong in some situations.
I suggest the following changes:
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When refitting a ship with a saved fitting the Cargo is not touched. Resulting in the Cargo being only a target of adding items, but not removing them. This can lead to cases where the cargo has not enought space for the fitting. To solve this fittings should get an “As Is” Option for the cargo which forces the cargo to have the exact contents of the fitting if refitted.
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When having ammo and charges saved with a fitting and refitting a ship it checks the cargo of the ship with a simple == compare. Charges and Ammo already loaded into weapons and modules are ignored for the check. This means if you want 1000 rounds you will get them loaded in as soon as your cargo doesnt have this exact value. This is an unexpected behaviour in cases where you already have more loaded. For these items the check should be changed to < compare and elements loaded into weapons/modules should be counted in in the total. In addition only the missing numbers should be loaded so you end up with the amount you wanted. This would change the behaviour to what the fitting ui lets you expect.
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The modifications to the cargo should be moved to the end of the refitting progress. When refitting a ship to a simulated one the result can become wrong. If you have a ship with a module with loaded script and refit to a simulation with the same module and same script, but script in cargo, the fitting result will become wrong if you dont have a duplicate of that script in your hangar. What happens is that the cargo gets checked and after that the fitted script gets removed from the module. As a result you will have the script in your hangar, but it couldnt get moved because it was not available at the time the cargo was checked.
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The end of refit info screen lacks information and shows wrong information. The information shown lacks the reason why an item could not be fitted (was it not available in the hangar? Cargo full? etc). Some information is also wrong because you get scripts and ammo shown as “wasnt fitted” if the correct amount was already in cargo and thus fitting it was not required in the first place. This should be cleared up to make it more visible why something could not be fitted and entries that didnt require fitting should be removed from the list. This should be a general place to show all errors encountered during fitting (see rigs below). The data for this should be readily available by the process code.
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Fittings should be overwriteable. This is selfexplaining.
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The fitting screen should allow drones to be moved into groups in station. There is little reason why this is only available in space. The groups should also be saveable with the fitting.
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Ammo and scrips loaded into modules/weapons should be saved together with them. Currently the fittings result in non combat ready ships as additional steps are required to make them combat ready.
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The info message for Rigs is wrong in some cases and is shown in the wrong place. If your ship has rigs fitted and the fitting has rigs as well you get a brief white on black text telling you that rigs where not fitted. This text is in the wrong place as there is already a end of fitting info that is more persistent and should contain this information. In addition the information shown is wrongly shown if the ship and the fitting have the exact same rigs and thus fitting was not required in the first place. In cases a change in rigs would be required there should be a promt and an “Force” Option for the fitting to make this better useable.
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Add container support for fittings. Im sure that the current inventory code has its limitations and that alot of it is a decade old, but the cluttering of the hangar in order to supprot fitting and refitting is not acceptable.
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(From Post below) Save exact module positions with fittings. In some cases modules can end up in a different order when loading a fitting compared to the original order when saved. This creates additional work to move them manually back into the desired place.