I thought of this when i ended up in a station for the first time in many years and found a Jaguar, it had 4 mods in the lows, and 3 turrets fitted despite that not matching current stats at all.
I thought it would be cool if when an update came out that updated a ship, it only applied to newly manufactured ships and all existing ones stayed as before the update.
it wouldn’t have to be 100% rule if a ship update was due to it being completely OP or broken.
The old ship type could be called like ‘Jaguar D22’ for deprecated in 2022 to make it a separate ship type for example. (or ship version could be another attribute)
From a lore point of view it fits that ships wouldn’t magically change.
when thinking about BPOs and BPCs though, it is still odd that these magically change, but maybe they are not paper blueprints, but instead permanent or single use access tokens to the npc corps blueprint server - in which case that would make sense that they got updated
- It would create another type of rare resource for collectors.
- also a nice incentive for returning players to dig through their assets.
- not much dev/testing needed as the old ship is a well known entity