[Proposal]: Allow saving of ship builds

[clintonmead]

Suggestion

I often find myself swapping between both ships and outfits. For example I'll switch to a cargo ship for some trading and then back to a combat ship. But often those ships share outfits, like engines, distributors, and other equipment.

Similarly, even if I'm at a station without a spaceport, I may find myself switching between builds. I might generally fly with a cargo hull, with some cargo pods, but switch to a more armoured offensive build when I want to perform a mission involving combat. And I might have another build that's just intended for fast travel with speed increase utilities and a faster engine, but saving on weight, perhaps stripping out weapons and other items for example.

When one's personal inventory grows, switching between such builds becomes increasingly time consuming and fiddly, especially when you have a variety of ships.

It would be good if one could instead save such builds, and then reload them just by clicking on them in the outfitting tab. Of course such builds will need to be saved to the save file.

If a build can't be entirely completed when selected due to missing out, probably a warning should be given but the build should be completed as much as possible, and in this case I don't think the build should be changed, as the player may rebuy the missing outfit in the future.

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[bobbens]

Having ship builds would probably be quite a boon to the early game. Late game, most players will probably build several ships for different roles, so they would be less important, but players don't have that luxury early game.

I think probably the best way to go about it would be to extend the equipment screen to have tabs on the right side. Right now you can switch between normal stats + intrinsic stat view, so having a tabbed system that would let you do something like: normal stats, intrinsic stats, and ship builds. You could have something like 10 slots per ship (maybe 3 is enough?), and let the player simply save to a slot, load from a slot, or clear a slot. The main tricky part is there would need a way to show when a slot outfit requirement can't be met (say the outfit was sold or put into another ship). Other than that, it should be more or less straight-forward.