New way to do non-jumpable ships
I've seen the highliner mod, and thought it was a neat idea, but making non-highliners fighters removes a lot of things they can do really. So I recently came up with a way to basically prevent small ships from warping but allow large ships. It involves modding solar system and galaxy generation, like the quad mods and such. You also can add in a few components but don't have to remove any, to make it work a little better. It may be that this kind of solar system modding is not possible but if it is this might work better for a highliner type of thing.
Set up all your types of solar systems such that every warp point does a high amount of damage when you warp through. Whatever the level is, it should be enough to destroy any or most small ships that go through, but not big ships. Then, you can have harder and easier warp points that need bigger or smaller ships to get through them.
Then the components you can add to make warping easier on the large ships is a VERY LARGE (say 800kt) armor piece that has great enough resistance to absorb the warping damage. It should be expensive and can represent the cost of your warping technology, whatever it is. Then small ships can't fit in the armor piece, but large ships can. It shouldn't be so good that highliners never die, but it good enough to have no or almost no damage in warping where a small ship would die.
Then small ships can be used for combat by giving them to hit bonuses or some other sort of thing. This is a bit different than highliners though, I guess because they will never be able to go to a different system since they can't be in cargo. You could still have a lot of fighter tech for your highly mobile fighting vehicles and let smaller ships be highly effective system defense vessels.
There is some question about how warp damage applies across fleets (does each ship take the damage or is the damage applied once across the fleet?), either answer could be interesting though. This would make in system colonizing much easier than out system, if the highliner colony ships were more expensive.
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