Coraxus: Oooh, what're you working on? Or do you want to keep the details secret? How far along are you? Etc?
Geek: I haven't gotten a chance to seriously look into the weapon ranges yet, but it's on my to-do list!
daowei: Just sent you a PM!
1purevengance1: Glad you're enjoying it so much! I feel like it'd be best to try to keep things mostly in email, to avoid too many spoilers. But a few spoilers aren't too bad! So I'll go ahead and respond here:
The fuel scoop, and the other expensive ship upgrades, are game-changers for many types of ships, so I wanted to make them a serious investment - my goal was that, unlike in stock EVO, the player will have to pick and choose which ones are most important to them - and will also have to be strategic in determining how much money to invest in upgrades for their current ship, vs saving up to get more upgrades on a future ship - and getting a cheap ship w/ many upgrades vs an expensive ship w/ few upgrades, etc.
Re: traders: IIRC in the actual EVO game (not as a plug-in for Nova), the UE, at least, doesn't like it when you raid traders. I'll look into it!
By "UE frontier ship", I assume you mean the Freight-Courier? You see them all over the Crescent even in stock EVO, so I figured as long as they're there, you may as well be able to hire them. I think stock-EVO's explanation is that those are the only human civilians with ships robust-enough to travel around the Crescent and survive against the renegades.
The "variants" in EVO: Expanded are the same ships w/ diff weapon loadouts - the idea behind them is just that different captains put different weapons on their ships, instead of in stock EVO where all captains always have the default weapons.