EV-Edit workability, 5 questions
Perhaps I'm completely missing the boat, here (perhaps I'm also posting on the completely wrong forum), but I'm unable to decipher this, and the documents dealing with these things have been no help at all, so I've resolved to come here.
For starters, I've never made a plug-in. Rather, what I do is play plug-ins, and if I find bugs in them, I fix them and keep playing. If I think something might be better some way, I change it and just play this plug-in myself for my personal use, I don't redistribute it or anything.
However, something puzzles me. When I open plug-ins with EV Edit, and say, open the stellars area, it will show all the stellars relevant to the plug-in. There are some that are brand new, and some that are of course in the normal EV. However, many of the stellars in the normal game that don't show in the plug data are indeed in the game when you play it with the plug. My question is, if there seems to be no connection at all when looking at the plug data, how exactly does the game place everything perfectly when it is being played? That being said, I have another question. In the game, some ships may have proton turrets or what-not, but these things haven't been changed in the plug at all, so they are nowhere to be found in the outfits or weapons section. When I go to look at the ship in the plug data, the slot where it should have something like a proton turret shows "ignored" and whatever number of proton turrets the ship should have. Of course, if I save and go to play the game again, the proton turrets cease to exist. So how can they exist and not exist at the same time? Finally, similar problem with weapon sounds, the numbers in the plug are exactly the same as in the normal game, 200 to 223, and many, if not most, of the plug's weapon sounds are set to 223, yet in the game they make the sound they are supposed to. If I open the weapon and just close it, doing nothing else but saving it, of course one will hear the forklift sound.
It almost seems to me that the best guess should be that this plug was made with a different editor altogether, because this just isn't making any sense at all to me. Could this be the case? And if so, could someone direct me to what I should be looking for?
My next question is fairly simple, but I guess it partially depends on the answer to my first question. Simply put, why make a plug-in? When I have made a "plug" for personal use, what I simply did was copy the EV Data, modify it however I wanted, and simply moved the original someplace safe, renamed my "plug" to "EV Data" and fired away. Seems one hell of alot simpler to me, though I think I can envision the arguments against doing this (if one isn't organized like myself, then they'll lose the original EV Data and be forced to re-download, and so on and so forth...). I mainly do this because the issues discussed in the first question bother me, but of course, if these issues were resolved by some editor that didn't work that way, of course I wouldn't see it as a problem.
My next question relates to shield recharge. I understand that everything seems to be based on the number "30", like, how long the weapon lasts, how far it goes in one second, and so on. However, applying this to shield regeneration seems extremely silly. If the number's high for a capital-type ship, shield boosters are too useless. If the number's high for a fighter-type ship, shield boosters are too good. The setup just seems kind of dumb, in my opinion. Recording the shield and armor values as variables and giving a regeneration rate as an actual NUMBER (I.E. 15 shields per second, or whatever) just seems to be alot more reasonable. Of course, I wouldn't expect everyone to change the game just for me, I just find it extremely irritating and would feel stupid if I didn't mention it.
However, if the previous wasn't irritating (minor issue, doesn't matter in the long run), this is. Why do my fighters only get half the ammunition that they're supposed to? =( One thing I like better about EV Classic (and quite possibly the one thing that makes EV Classic a good game as compared to Nova, which is garbage) is that computer vessels' weapons have longer range. The developers sure got this one right, but I have no idea what happened with Nova, but fortunately, it's not my intention to discuss that. Why can't my fighters have full ammo? That's all I want to know. 
It might not be so bad if the half ammo was at least rounded up instead of down. You can be sure that any plug that allows me to sell manta bays is a good one for me, because I want mantas that can fire missles.
Finally, while you can set the amount of credits that personality characters in the game have (plus or minus 25%), where do you set this for the normal everyday ships that you're encountering in the game? I can't seem to find this anywhere, at least not in EV Edit, or is the number completely arbitrary based on the cost of the ship? Even that I'm not so sure of, because some huge capital ships give me no more than 1000 credits, every single time. I don't know why. Either way, arbitrary numbers based on the vessels' original prices are, well...too arbitrary. It's way too easy to earn money fast in basically every game I play where all the ships give money, and it's no fun raiding ships when they have no money to give. Neither option seems any good.
Anyways, I hope you can answer my questions, I've tried my best not to be too rude. 
Thanks for reading!