The standard approach, conceptually, among proponents of refits is to take an old ship (either in our inventory or from Trek lore) and upgrade it to T5.

But what if, instead, we went to Utopia Planetia with our existing ship and said, "Scrap the hull and put the interior components into a brand new replica hull of my choosing."

And you'd get a list of ship hulls that are comparable in size that you can do that with.

So it wouldn't be refitting a Connie, for instance. It would be taking my Defiant to Utopia Planetia and saying, "Hey? Can you gut this and cram the innards into a replica hull?" And it would retain its loadout and stations and abilities, just with a new skin. It would still be a Defiant class, just crammed into a new hull.

i made a thread proposing something similar to this almost 3 months ago.
Didn't really go anywhere.

I think the issue lies with how cryptic made the ships. If i recall, they tie the Ship status UI to each ship with appropriate hard points and ship values. so this means they actually have to make a whole new model of skin, paper sheet status and relevant values to each of the 3 variants. And that is applied over your toons image when flying space....which is why you could see yourself falling in space sometimes when you left a starbase.

It would be better if they could separate those allowing you to use the UI skin of any existing skin no matter the level of your character.

I do wish that your idea or others like it would make this so much more easy to pilot a craft, they visually like, without so much waiting and effort behind the existing process.

It might have been an issue at launch but I'd imagine now that doing this would simply be a permanent, invisible holo-emitter buff.

I do see your point.

Those holo emitters you get from the latinum swap...if they can last for 15 minutes.....why cant they be turned on permanently?? is that what your going for?

I don't see why consoles and boff slots have to be tied to the ship itself. Why can't they be tied to a slottable item like a bridge module?


Memory Alpha states:

Most bridges on Starfleet vessels were replaceable modules, so that adaptation for special missions or upgrading was expedited.

Well, I can see why they're limited duration since they make us look like something other than a native ship of our faction and because they come from a minigame.

But I'm just using them as a tech example. "Night of the Comet" is another example.

We go to Utopia Planetia. We pick a similarly sized ship. We dump a massive amount of something like merits into it and we get a permanent costume applied to our ship.

The headache of actually upgrading the stats for old ships is gone because we're just cramming the guts of our new ships into a replica shell.

It also doesn't lock them out from doing a T6 or a T7 or a T8. With normal refits, they'd be constantly redesigning specific ships. With this, they're simply allowing an old skin to be applied to a new ship that is comparable in size. (And, planning ahead, maybe future tiers would have three sizes of ship for each class.)