- I would really like to be able to scale X, Y, and Z axes separately, to be able to make something thicker or narrower without also making it taller, and so on.
- I would like X, Y, and Z indicators that show which was is forward, at the very least. I have only done it occasionally, but sometimes I've got a ship pointed in the wrong direction and it flies backward in the Fleet Battles. (I'd probably rotated the view, decided I didn't like what I had, deleted everything, started with a part that has no obvious front, and...oops. No amount of rotating the base seems to change which way is forward, either. Very frustrating.)
- I would like the engines and thrusters to not actually have their own geometry, and for the mounted engine to not leave trails. The ship parts that resemble engines already leave trails, so the new engine is just extra.
Further, both engine and thruster geometry is often far too large to conceal if we only want the ship geometry to represent the engines, for example. At the very least, the size of the mount should change the size of what gets mounted. (Weapons don't show up on their mounts, for example.) Or, have ship parts not generate trails, but allow us to have as many engine mounts as we want, placed anywhere we want. It'd be purely aesthetic; the engine would still have the same power/speed.
- I must second the need for the weapon mounts' directions to determine the direction of fire. But, with that in mind, we might need to have a way to make them fire in a symmetrical manner. For example, if we put a weapon mount facing sideways, we might want to have the same on the other side so we don't always have to face the same direction relative to our target.
This, of course, presents energy-consumption problems; if we're allowed multiple weapon mounts, that might give us too much power. Possible solution: for each weapon mount, firing takes more energy, thus limiting the amount of extra damage that might be done by limiting the rate of fire.
- Cut-and-paste options and/or automatic symmetry. Sometimes, getting a ship part into the right position at the right scale and rotation can be a gigantic pain...and then, if we want the exact same thing on the other side of the ship, we now have to memorize or write down the parameters from the original (or constantly re-select it and memorize a few of the settings) in order to get the other part to conform. Giant pain in the butt.
- Alien-builder. (This one is a bit of a pie-in-the-sky wish, I realize.) The other ships have animated pilots, but our custom ships have some weird-lookin' squidgy thing that isn't animated. I'd like to be able to build my own alien species to fly the ship. Like the creature builder from Spore, only less cartoony.
I can probably think of more if I try, but those are what come to my brain now...
