FC Forums

By laws of common sense, no one's going to be content using the same ship as everyone else. There's still going to be a niche market for 'smexxy' ships, but it'll be a small one compared to people who just want a ship that can fight at as low a price as possible.

There's a reason most of the people on the forum have their own collections of ship designs. Everyone wants to design, build, and use their own. If someone build a perfect replica of, say, the Enterprise, other people might buy that because it's a lot quicker than building one of their own, and will theoretically be the exact same thing, but I can't see that happening all that much with ships that are their builders' own designs unless ships are pretty hard to build yourself.

Originality is a good trait to have, people will want it.

There are loads of bad builders out there who would like the ability to use a good looking ship. There are lots of good builders out there who would like their work to be recognise and revered. The ability to trade designs is a good way of solving both those problems.

Detailed ships are a novelty item. There's absolutely no way around that; the detailing added to ships now only decreases the viability of them ingame as that's added blocks with no discernible benefit save for looking good. There should be nothing stopping you from trading the designs themselves, but once it's out there there's very little you can do about people welding phalluses to your dainty star galleon and launching them, or even passing them off as their own creations. The far easier solution is to just allocate a specific part of the futurecraft site to that end and let people who want to release their designs do so without impeding on what will be a key part of commerce within FC.