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So I was thinking about the fine print of designing and selling blueprints. I did search for this but didn’t come up with anything so if I’m rehashing a past topic I apologize. Maybe I used the wrong terms when searching. I have come to think of DU as a Ready Player One of sorts. Be who you want to be. Build what you want to build. Fly around in the Serenity and park it in your personal Battlestar. Now that being said, people are going to build X-wings, Normandys, Sulacos and Gunstars. That can’t be stopped. BUT... Part of the idea of the game is to build and SELL blueprints to make a galactic living. The price of things in game can go back to being able to exchange for DACs which have a real world cost. That being said, what’s the legality of someone selling in game assists that are based on an existing IP being that in game items can eventually be traced back to real world costs? It’ll cost you 5 DACs for a blueprint of an Enterprise with a shuttle craft. Anywho.. those are my current thoughts. Peace, love and “For Science”!
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So here's one from the discord. Idea courtesy of TheGreatPigeon who assures me he's too lazy to post it. I like it enough I'll put it up and give my thoughts on it. The basic gist is to allow a construct made from a blueprint to be edited, and for those changes to, themselves, be saved as a blueprint. Unlike a normal blueprint, this new type (We'll call it a 'schematic' for now,) can't be used in a factory by itself or to make new constructs. In order to be used, it requires either a construct the original blueprint was for, or a copy of that blueprint alongside it. A usage case: X designs a fightercraft that's fairly popular. Z finds that it's undergunned and a little slow for his tastes. He adds some more weapons, changes the materials to lighten it up, and adds a sick spoiler just for fun. When he saves this, it becomes a schematic. If he has a copy of X's fighter, he can apply that schematic, in a factory or some other industrial unit, or possibly directly to the construct using guides and his nanoformer. If he has a BP, he can put both into a factory and produce a copy of the fighter with his schematic already applied. If he has neither the fighter or the blueprint, his schematic doesn't do anything at all. So this achieves a few things: 1: It allows iterative creativity while still protecting the IP of the original creator. 2: It can drive market sales for all parties. If Z's schematic is really popular, People are going to want to buy a lot more of X's fighter to get to use it! 3: It can allow players/orgs to customize their own variants of a construct without needing the original designer to do the work themselves, but still get paid for their original work. Now obviously, as a toggle, a BP could still have an "Allow/Disallow schematics" sort of option, to give the original IP holder more control. But I think a system like this could allow for some very interesting interactions to take place, without any enormous degree of additional complexity.