I am so happy that we finally have the ability to really build custom starships. The existing custom ship building system was severely limited, not least because the base starship designs were in desperate need of updating. But, the Corvettes are a completely different scale, compared to regular ships, and the game has been designed around the scale of the existing ships. The Corvettes don’t fit in freighters, they don’t fit on ship landing pads, and when you’re just teleporting from base to base, they might spawn partly inside of structures. They’re somewhere between a starship and a freighter, but they’re not very suitable for either.
I would love to be able to build a small custom starship, that isn’t just one of the existing fighter, hauler, etc designs, but that is still just a single pilot cockpit vessel, like an x-wing. I would also love to be able to build a fully custom freighter! The existing freighters are unnecessarily large, with most of their size being totally useless polygons. I would build a fully custom large capital ship, with a holding bay for single pilot starships, that would stay mostly in space or in orbit around a planet, and then have those starships for hopping around from planet to planet.
I think Hello Games needs to once and for all figure out the scale of things, because right now it’s kind of all over the place. Like, it’s great that we can now walk into our Corvette ships, but why can’t we just get a cockpit that opens? Why can’t I just have a small fighter that has a cockpit I can just get in out of?
I’m going to keep playing with the Corvettes to see what I can come up with, but I really think they further expose a fundamental flaw worth the scale is the game as it is. But, maybe that can only be resolved in a completely new game.
I have been loving them, the first thing I did was build one to look like an aircraft carrier, and I think the therin lies the intended “scale”. 1 hab length feels too much like a regular starship, but 5+ Hab lengths begins to feel like a real “inbetween”. But its also…still agile when rotating to shoot things you lock onto in space. Probably in the 2-3 Hab Length range is what feels fluid but also big enough to justify the extra landing space. After testing that, I went to the anomaly and sure enough most Corvettes are about 3 or so Hab lengths. (Many people seem to just make massive versions of existing ships, funny enough. I stepped up to one that looks like an enlarged Interceptor).
But yes instead of this I would have rather had a custom build Freighter, tbh. But I don’t think at this stage that is possible.