https://preview.redd.it/kxqb9w7z5g1d1.jpg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c2cc7da37bc64336051ef696d50ee641e790f349

So, Frigates, right?

Most of us have probably not been inside one since we stopped having to repair them, and repairing them wasn’t a lot of fun — just walking around an empty ship until you reach the thing, feed it materials, ship is fixed. It’s incredibly dull, and the moment we all discovered how to prevent ships from taking damage, most of us never wanted to set foot on a frigate again.

Yet the ships themselves are quite interesting. Bridges, ladders, engine rooms, cannons, multiple floors, they have a lot of parts on them, and they’re actually quite nice to look at, they’re just hopelessly empty with nothing to do or interact with on them. The engine rooms alone are pretty badass (and I wish we could jump out of them, but there’s an invisible wall).

Turning them into an activity might be fun though. If you could find crashed frigates, it would be an excuse to utilize these cool ship designs in a way that we might actually appreciate them. Add an enemy or two in them, a malfunctioning Sentinel that goes “boo” when you try to loot a crate, keep us on our toes.

Besides minor rewards like nanites and parts that can sell for units, I would also like to propose two more interesting rewards: once you “finish” the damaged frigate exploration, you would gain either the ability to repair it and add it to your fleet, or to salvage a usable part from it. The salvaged part could be used to modify one of your existing frigates, replacing one of its qualities — so if one of your fleet’s Exploration ships has “Malfunctioning Shield Generators” for -2 combat, maybe you can use a part you salvaged off a crashed Frigate to turn that into “Radar Array” for +4 exploration, letting you keep a ship that you might otherwise have dismissed.