Currently, certain Artifacts are of no use anymore. I dislike that my cargo is packed with thousands of Artifacts that have very little effect. These artifacts are as follows:

Alarm Sentry
Dark Pyramid
Grav-Whip Trap
Omicron Mine Trap
Planetary Aegis
Sentry Guards
Shield Sentries
Subspace Seeker
Tachyon Cylinder
Void Shell

The planet artifacts are great if you're holding off Rank 50 Ships, but that's not very hard to do with just a single Obviation Barrier. While I was playing another of my favorite games yesterday, I had an idea for all of these useless Artifacts that nobody uses anymore - scaling.

To put it simply, the higher a Rank you are, the more of a bonus these Artifacts will give. I've not yet worked out the specifics, because I don't want to do it just to have people say "this is such a horrible idea you should be so ashamed of yourself for suggesting it".

Please give me you first thoughts on this idea, and then I'll edit my post with numbers if the general feedback is that people like it.

Can you add ship bots to the list...

Umbongo, Ship-Bots scaling with rank makes them just as useless as before.

The problem with the idea is that everybody can interact with everybody in GL. What happens if a rank 100 hits a rank 3000's Grav-Whip?

-1 for the scanning artis.

Planetary Aegis is used for a specific reason early on in the game; defending from other low ranks.

As it stands, the uses for "useless" artifacts are in the CTLab and/or missions.

I do think that the scrap values should be greater for artifacts though. Even a rank 1 ship couldn't come close to being able to survive off of the scrap value of their artifacts, which I think should be possible because then there's the trade-off between artifacts for Cr and artifacts for their actual inherent use. Though you can just sell on the GTC.

I kind of skimmed over the scaling part... I just want something to do with my ship bots

Dark pyramid, tachyon and subspace seekers are used to build ct lab things, they still are usefull
Alarm sentry is good because it triggers as soon as theres a tap whilst others have only a chance, great for catching and punishing taps on planets

Sentries can be used to build dormanin walkers, so are moderately usefull for bricking a planet pre temping

-1 to the suggestion, but if you have thousands of these artis ... i will gladly take them off your hands. just let me know what artis you think are 'useful' that you want in return. this body does not live on TMs alone