is there a good way to do this?
EVN is set up so that, at some point new ships become available, appearing in both the shipyard, and as randomly appearing ships in a system. Both the RAGE gunboat and the Zephyr fall into this category. I want to do something like this, but a little more ambitious.
I want to have a government that uses a fighter, the F1. This fighter is found patrolling its systems, and also found aboard the government's carriers.
At some point I want the F1 to be replaced by the F2 (and later the F3 and F4). At this point I want the F2 to appear as a new patrolling craft in the government's systems, as well as aboard the government's carriers. The trick is, when the F2 is released, I want all F1's to go away.
Obviously the F1 and F2 will have to be different ship resources. So will the F1 amd F2 fighter and fighter bay outfits. The carriers that carry the F1's and F2's will also have to be different variants of the carrier. I can control the F1 and F2 availability in the shipyard, hiring an escort in the bar, outfit fighter and fighter bay, all by using the availability fields and bit sets.
What I don't understand is, how can I make the F1 stop being the regular patrol craft in a given system, and have it replaced by the F2? I'd like to swap out carrier variants at the same time. I suppose I could make mutally exclusive system resources for every variant of the F-series, but this seems rather tedious.
I can't just copy what was done with the Zephyr/RAGE gunboat because in both cases, the ship was just a new ship. It appeared as a random flying ship, but it didn't actually replace the appearance of another ship.
Is there another way to do this, other than creating different mutually exclusive masking system resources, each loaded with different dude type resources for the various F series fighters?