Unfortunately there's a limit on the number of ships you can build.  Sins is limited to nine frigates, nine cruisers, and nine capitals.  You can't build any more than that.  Subsystems also can't be done as there is no ship module capability in Sins.  Sure, you could add subsystems as abilities, but the only ships in Sins capable of doing limited abilities are capital ships.  The other ships all have them unlocked and leveled via researches, and researches in Sins can't be made mutually exclusive.  Having weapons being unlocked via ability also contradicts with E-War capabilites, since all those would have to be done via abilities, and the most abilites a ship can have is 5, and the 5th ability on capitals has to be passive since its covered up by the level up button.  And no, you can't make it so systems can be blockaded just by having ships present there.  The best you could do is give ships an ability similar to the Sova's Embargo which blocks credit, metal, and crystal income, but again that uses an ability slot and would probably be overpowered.

The best you could do with Sins is make it Sins with Eve ships.  Major Stress tried to make Sins into Star Trek, but even he couldn't do it, and so SoA plays extremely similarly to base Sins.  The biggest culprit in this is the un-moddable A.I. Sins uses.  And CCP is extremely protective of their IP.  Good luck getting permission to use their models.

1.  Okay, if 9 frigates, 9 cruisers, and 9 capitals works, that's great.

2.  Only starbases can be upgraded like that.  Ships and planet modules can't be upgraded via selected individual upgrades.

3.  Yes, its possible to code E-War as various abilities.  ECM is problematic though.  I'm not sure how that would be done.

4.  Sorry, but chances are you will run smack into hardcoded limits and a retarded A.I. if you change the gameplay too much.  Sins' Iron Engine is great for Sins and similar gameplay, but it won't like it if you change it too much.  Ask Major Stress about his difficulties if you want to know more.

Is it not possible to list the ships as 'starbases' and getting upgrades round like that? If not, I'd be happy to settle for research/then ability in order to get subsystems

Something fairly weak with severe stacking penalties. I'm looking into the numbers behind it at the moment.

I've worked with AI before. The changes wouldn't be so extreme as to move away from sins 'core' gameplay, but the AI will certainly require some tweaking. I'll look into contacting Major Stress about it when I can find time.

Apologies Re: the format. My Internet connection is pretty sporadic and I tend to type up longer stuff in a word processor. will fix it.

Even without the IP, sorting the balance stuff would make it interesting. I'd be more than happy to fiddle and write things around it should obtaining persmission fail.

Forget the IP (and the AI) and you can create a game that doesn't play similarly to Sins at all. SoA has done the best job shoehorning Star Trek gameplay into Sins but it's still Sins as you noted. If you do a mod setting out to change Sins gameplay considerably with the setting as your secondary focus, you will never succeed in escaping a lot of the trappings of Sins but you can do a pretty damn good job.

Most of the stuff mentioned may be possible if you find a way to do it without making the game crash. That is the trick, and where sins is unforgiving in some aspects. Many of the suggestions that were made for SoA 2 mod were tried,... and they failed miserably, because of the sins hard code. An example is the cloaking ability. Which sins has sort of a cloaking ability in itself. The Vasari Phase cloak, and Phase out hull ability. We just tried to modify it to where the ships, icons, and hud were all invisible. That is impossible to do, because this is hard coded into sins itself. We can however simulate a cloak to where the ships cant fire on one another, but you still know the ship is present. Many other things were tried like tractor beams, Borg assimilation etc. etc. You can "simulate" many things, but it is not the same as a full blown ability from scratch.

The only way you are going to find out if you can similate tech 1, tech 2, Kinetic, EM, Explosive, and heat in Weapon damage, Shields, and Armor is to try it. If it fails at least you know you tried. ECM/ECCM to-hit buff, and debuff abilitys can be simulated easily. So can radar enhancers, jammers. Afterburners, etc. Even warp scrammers can be simulated. The things you cant simulate are weapon/ammo changes on the fly. If a ship has one damage type it always has that damage type. If a Caracal is equiped with tech 2 kinetics it will always have tech 2 kinetics.

Yes you can make a ship upgrade with a new physical model to represent that upgrade. The ship entitys do support this. We tried it in SoA 2 with the Excelsior, and Lakota refit. The only part we couldnt get right was the old excelsior model dissapearing after the upgrade was complete. It would spawn a new ship on top of the old. We tried to have it as a researchable ability not as research itself then all models upgraded like the hangar defense, turrets, and starbases. So that idea was scrapped for now. Again the only way you will know for sure is to try it.

Yes CCP is very protective of its IP. Nuff said. If you can pull it off with their approval then good on ya. I am not trying to discorage you here. I am all for an eve mod. However i would hate to see you make good progress then get cease, and desist letters. Check with CCP about this before you dive into it. They are pretty cool about it, as the HW2 eve mod shows.

Look at the Tech hangar defense, and Advent beam turrets as examples. Both the models and their entity files. All Entrenchment ship entitys support upgrades. Those are the same models, but with new extentions added after they are upgraded. A new mesh with the visible upgrade replaces the old. Same with the Starbases for Tech and Vasari. I see no visible difference with Advent starbase upgrades. though it has upgrade meshes. We tried to do the same thing with the SoA 2 Excelsior, and Galaxy models to upgrade them to the Lakota variant, and the Venture refit. However we also tried to keep the original non-refitted ships buildable, and that is where we failed. If we made it to where it was a straight forward upgrade then it would have succeded.

I can give you an example that would work. The Caldari Roch battleship, or any eve ship with visible turrets. You can have a physical model that has a visible representation of short range tech 1 turrets. You can use an "upgrade mesh" to simulate it upgrading with long range tech 2 turrets. The upgrade mesh would be a roch model with visable tech 2 turrets or missile launchers. You can research the upgrade. Once the research is finished all roch t1 meshes would be replaced by the new upgraded t2 mesh. The drawback is that you cant build the old tech 1 ships again. Then again why would you want to.

It is possible to pull modules off. How you do it would be the trick.

What you do have to be careful with in this aspect is Sins hardcoded mesh and texture limits. Sins only supports 1000 textures, and 300 meshes total. With tons of upgrade meshes it would be easy to hit those limits.

yeah, Sins doesn't support model animation. The only known workaround is to use a particle mesh (reference the B5 mod).

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/363233

Consolidated list of sins hard code limits. The most important limits IMO are the mesh, and texture limits. Most of the others you probably can work around, or improvise. One way to get past the texture limit is to have more than one mesh use the same texture sheet. The limit is the actual number of textures not the size. Though you still want to keep your texture resolutions at 2048 or under. Sins has had trouble in the past using over 2 gigs of ram. It was supposedly fixed. Still when you mod just keep in mind less is more.

The 300 mesh limit could be problematic for you if you plan on using upgrade meshes. We are still not sure if sins loads all its meshes at once or accesses them as needed.

Weapon Hardpoints are limited to 10 per weapon type. You can have 3 weapon types max. I dont see any issues because most eve ships never had more than 7, or 8 weapon slots IIRC. Last time i played eve was 2007.

We have exceeded hardcode limits before and the game still functioned, but it functioned very poorly. Example if you used more than 10 points per weapon only 10 points would function. SoA 2 was way over the mesh, and texture limit for a long time. The 1.041 patch really made the hardcode limits a problem, and many mods (including mine) had to be rebuilt from scratch because of it. Now if you exceed the limits sins will just dump on you, and not give you a clue as to why. Developer exe only helps with some scripting troubleshooting, and sometimes it still wont tell you which file is giving you trouble.

Ok i stand corrected. I forgot that Entrenchment increased the weapon point limits. I was still going by the pre-entrenchment sins limit. So i guess weapon points will not be an issue here.

Limits are usually possible to get around/fake around/etc, so I'm not that worried.

Alright, been running some spreadsheet work and am thinking of making each race sufficiently differnt in regards to mechanics behind resource gathering, culture, production and combat.

Possible to make Miners you can anchor them 'pack up'? I assume you could make a frigate that produces a structure that's consumed, then make the structure produce a frigate, but be consumed.

Doable? or not so much?

u could most likely make a ship->starbase->refinery ships->mobile mining the trick is to make the SB into an orbital refinery

I have a spreadsheet of clearly doable ships and abilities.

I have EVE ships working in Sins with proper ability points and re-textured to have team color sections.

I have a VERY detailed instructions Word file on how to get tri-exported ships into Sins.

I do not have anyone to make the ability, ship, or race files (though I think I could do the race files, and at least part of the ship files).

I do not have any icons, although I could do that myself.

I was thinking CCP might be more inclined to grant permission if I had something of my mod I could show them that worked and looked alright.

Other than that, I mostly just ran out of time to complete it all on my own.

How many people are there that would be seriously interested in working on and completing an EVE mod for Sins?

Gratz, and gl