Yeah, having a movie before anything else is visible is exactly what I was talking about. You have one standard movie you reference with a given class of planet, and it just has this short "going down" sequence that occurs. It might be thought of as a waste of memory, but I think it would add greatly to the sense of place if done right.
As far as the tc development problem goes; are shipyards really such a bad idea? It seems that even if multiple plugins end up using the same ship design, the writing and setting make it a different place, a different universe if you will. I cant say that the writing is harder; for me it certainly isnt; I just think it might be more important, because no matter how great the graphics, you are dealing with a small, rotating, cartoonish ship on a flat screen at the end of the day; whereas writing is what makes a player suspend their disbelief or fail to suspend it. You imagine what the text merely implies, and it becomes more real, because you have a far better "graphics engine" in our head than exist in any computer... Exactly why people read novels, even in the digital age.
It seems that with a shipyard, you can have a centralized place where tc developers can go even to request special projects, and graphics guys have the satisfaction of knowing that thier work will actually be used.
Obviously, I'm not an experinced developer, so I wont opine anymore...