As a person who's real life job (one of them) is patents, I'm going to go out on limb here and say no. We don't need that kind of baggage on our ship designs. Now if you are talking about Read only blueprints that doesn't allow a ship to be edited upon being created/printed. Sure. But all the hassle of locking out reverse engineering?
I did lay down my agriculture suggestion at the other thread, but here goes nothing .
My suggestion revolves around certain things :
1) Fertile Grounds : You can't just prop up agriculture anywhere, and not any ground is equally fertile. This would emulate the EVE Online mentality of "less safety = more productivity". So, inside the Arkships' Safezones? The yeild is slow, but the productivity rate is of-put by the sheer number of immediate access. Some "herbs" can't be placed within the Arkship's Safezone. Sorry aspiring Druglords, Arkship says no-no. You wanna be a thug? You better live in the thug-lands. The further one is from the Arkship, the better (and faster) the yield is on crops. As an added bonus, you can't have the plants be in constant lack of sunlight.
2) GMO Food : Instead of upgrading harvesters, we simply have genetics in the game. You start with harvesting a certain plant, then researching it, then researching it even more to produce a better variant of it, like a better variant of it, then you use this "Blueprint Copy" (ala EVE Online) and plant seeds on the ground, which will produce them Brocollis of Doom. This guarantees that there are Seed Producers, and Farmers. Those two jobs, are not the same. One is producing sseds that only farmers buy, the other produces first sector products, like vegetables, similar to people in EVE producing Blueprint Copies for ship modules, while others buy said Blueprint Copies to keep their industry going.
3) Farmville Universe Online : like the "fuel for shields" idea, you got somethign like that but in reverse. You water a plant, and it gets a cooldown on it. The plant can be watered a set amount of times before its ripe for harvesting, some plants take more waterings per day to be produced at their maximum yield, some plants take less. It's what Genetic Modification is for, to make said better plants happen. After a certain amount of time, you choose to harvest the plants and go sell thme in the farmer's market or w/e.
So, with this model, a planet, far from a safezone, can produce a high count of a crop, but in exchange, you trade safety. Why? Cause if you were to produce 10 times as fast as a person inside a safezone would, with the added bonus of having little to no protection doing so as you can't keep all your crops within a permanent safety bubble, as Protection Bubbles and shields COST fuel (you need to upset the production somehow). It's a trade-off.
And let's be honest, dedicated farmers will be the ones to make mad banks out of this kind of gameplay, or people woh RP a lo and/or people running small communities in-game. Like JC said on the GDC Q&A, some places have easy access to food for cheap, others have not, so its value rises.
Just add the Good Ol' EVE mechanism of expiration dates, and while hunger won't be a legit worry, food going bad will be, as well as military bunkers requiring Cold Storage Units to slow down that expiration day dramatically.
These are my two cents on the matter
P.S. : this does not cover my idea of food processing. That's Cooking and it's a totally differnet beast to tackle
Darkarma got a reaction from Kurock in Patent a design
Darkarma got a reaction from Kytheum in In-game voice.