First of all, I am glad to see new, more specialized ships getting introduced to the game, especially when they are customizable. With the Destroyers, the secret project ships and the two original “unique” ships, the Endeavour and the Spiral, being my favourite ships in terms of customizability and the alien ships being my favourites in terms of progression and unique customizations I was really hoping to see the Mole ship follow suit of either one of these types of ships with module refitting, experience level bonus choices and perhaps even some unique models based on special modules.
I am incredibly disappointed to see the Mole just being another r16/17 ship with only the special module being swappable and no premium ship benefits. Seeing how the initial announcement was about the ship being specialized for PvE and Open Space use I was expecting the ship being more in line with the alien ships or the premium ships assembled from ship components as those have proven to be the most convenient ship choices to use in Open Space and the most versatile ships to use in PvE.
With the Mole in this state there are very limited options of customization, basically limited to the one purpose of mining and being a mule for OS groups. It doesn’t have the free repair, you can’t install unique engineering ship modules and weapons like you could with the Brock or the Mammoth, you can’t customize the module slots to your liking like you could with the secret project ships and you don’t even get the extra cargo slots, though the cargo won’t be a problem seeing that you get a portable cargo drone, but still, maybe you don’t want to carry a non-combat module around while grinding in OS.
The thing the left me questioning the design choices the most though was the distribution of the ship components. Why would you lock them behind a time limited event? And more important, why is the amount of parts required so ridiculously high? Yes, I know, you’d like us to spend money on the ship packs, but the ship in its entirety is not very attractive, especially not at that price, neither the amount of parts, nor the pack price seem justified.
While I hope that at some point all manufactured ships will get more customizable, the Mole really seems like the one that needs changes the most.
As a side note, I really hope there will be a mining weapon for other ships at some point, having that locked to a single ship is ridiculous, heck, I wouldn’t even mind if it was a premium module like the Cargo Extender and the Spatial Scanner.