To start, I’m glad that your ship inventory follows you when you switch home ships. It would be a pain to have to transfer everything manually and end up with multiple ships housing forgotten inventory forcing you to search ship after ship in your fleet to find specific items. However, my primary ship is built out to have an armory with cool things I’ve found displayed in weapon cases, on racks, etc. When you switch your home-ship, everything is dumped in to main inventory on the new ship, and even if you switch back to your original ship, the items are again dumped in to the main inventory. Not only does this hamstring the coolness of being able to display gear on a ship, but it can screw you over if the display items put your total inventory overweight in main storage. Over the course of certain questlines, you need to switch ships for the story, or maybe you come across a ship you decide to “liberate”, or maybe it’s a ship is a quest reward, regardless, your inventories get jumbled up. It seems to me, that your items could be tagged by the game to indicate which storage they were in (main, captain’s, other, display) so that as they move from ship to ship they can be better located. Additionally, I think the game could save the state of your inventory items and when they go back to a ship you’ve already set up, they would default to where they were before. I guess we’ll have to see what the modders can do.
TLDR: Why would I take the time to display my items if it’s all going to get thrown in to main storage anytime I switch ships…?
Yep, I set some stuff up one time and then swapped home ships only because I wanted to o steal and sell one, and you can’t sell one without registering it, and you can’t register it unless it’s your home ship.
I can understand why they made it this way, to a certain extent, but Bethesda games are- even more than other modern games- a power fantasy of becoming the best of the best without compromise, and being unable to have persistent decoration or even multi-container storage across ships feels restricting and further disincentivizes having multiple ships even more than unlimited fuel already does.
I at least would like the option to register and sell ships without making them your home ship, so at least if you wanted a single ship decorated and with the storage you want, that you could keep it that way without making engagement with other mechanics and quest lines impossible.
Missed opportunity to sell to pirates like the Crimson Fleet without registering it. Unless that comes later and I just never got to that point in the game.
Pirates wouldn’t care if the ship was registered or not and would likely either use it for more pirating such as ships that can do missions without being officially tied to them or for parts like a chop shop.
I’ve found you only make like 1,000 credits after registering the ship and selling it. Money to be made, sure, but not enough to make it viable when registration is required. Unless you count the valuables in the shop to offload at vendors in person.
I don’t believe you can sell a ship anywhere without registering. I haven’t found a way or read about it anywhere. Registering a ship to sell is more of an economy balance thing, it lowers the amount you get back for selling.
Bethesda seems to have very deliberately removed most of the common get rich quick methods, like having tons of houses and apartments to rob and such, so registering before selling ensures you can make money off ships, but it won’t give you end game money in two hours of grinding or anything.
That being said, they could’ve solved that issue in a more clever fashion than that.