Lienzo
Amanuensis
83
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Posted - 2015.04.10 00:52:08 -
[1] - Quote
For drilling or resource structures, I think it's important that they have an inverse relationship between security and profitability. Ideally, the simplest, cheapest, weakest and smallest ones go in places that only small ships can access.
The structures that need the most security are assembly and storage facilities. The can be extended to saying that they need the highest sensor strength, or the least exposure to probing. It would be reasonable to create system wide effects that can boost these, perhaps attached to sov. High security indexes, or anchorables which take advantage of these conditions, should diminish the efficiency of extractive structures.
Market or vendor structures offer us an interesting future option for keeping players in space. I think we are all familiar with the way that stations incentivize large numbers of people to go AFK.
One thing that I'd like to see with structures is to make them specialized. Some might be oriented to ammunition and resupplying ships, while others might look more like shipyards of various size. A harbor is a safe place in a storm. A ship is safe there, but ships aren't built to stay in harbors. It would be smart to put small docks in places that only small ships can visit. Medium sized docks and their environments might support small ships as well.
One thing that I'd really like to see from these industrial structures is something that caters to the obsessive industrialist. Make our skills apply to them individually. Instead of 300 max market orders everywhere, give us +1 market order slot per skill level at each vending machine. Maintaining significant numbers of them would mean spending a lot of time in space. The expense of database space and access time has gone down a lot since 2003, so it would make sense to leverage trends to cater to obsessive customers.
Ultimately, unless we are going to focus on making all future structures corp role dependent, all of the structures will need market components. If we are going to have a refinery array support more than just a privileged set of users within a single corp, then it would make sense to have it support a small mineral market. It could as easily be a place for a miner to vendor his haul as process it, or wheel and deal with his peers and competitors. |