Having just done a quick survey I note that most people use either the heavy or FC battery as soon as they can. There is no incentive to use the lower grade ones. What this essentially does is create two variants of every ship, a heavy bat and a FC version.

So why not can the batteries altogether? This will allow the Devs to balance the ships better since you can control all of its handling characteristics (some of which are dictated by the battery). For instance, you could get a ship that has a high battery capacity, which is offset by a lower recharge rate and higher mass.

You could prevent a FC version of this from being made because it might unbalance the game in some fashion.

By using this flexibility, the Devs could balance each ship variant individually without having to try and account for the fact that the ship could be used with either a heavy or FC battery.

They are already partially doing this with other variants. For example, there could be a cargo pod item, an armor item, etc.. that could be used interchangeably. They chose not to do this, my guess is because it would make balancing the ships nearly impossible given the astronomical number of combinations available.

So all you Bat lovers out there can start flaming me for my blasphemy.

Hmmm, interesting idea. This could work... I'd still like to see the addition of widget slots, though.

actually this idea has been proposed on a number of occasions, and the devs at one point said that a battery rebalance was coming. So we shall see what happens.

2 reasons. The fast charge gives people something to work for and the heavy battery still has its place, expecially for those who only chase in a sector. I, for example, can't chase someone through a wormhole as it takes too long to load. By the time i get there they are 1000m away or more.

I'd rather see batteries have mass so that one could make an extremely nimble ship by using the Light Battery, but not have much "range". Pretty much how the IBG is now I guess. Anything to bring more dynamics into the game.

well, in a way, that's already what does happen, but I pity the poor light ship pilot who tries to fly a 70 drain ship on a light battery.

They should copy off of EVN. EVERYTHING HAS MASS IN EVN (exccept cargo). So you cant create uber-duber ships.

Instead of each ship having specific drain for turbo, why not make the drain dependent on batteries? A light battery could then have low drain abut low capacity, heavy have high drain but huge capacity, etc, and then you choose it depending on your weapons and purpose (i.e. a fighter would take the heavy battery with high drain weapons, but a trader might have the light battery with low power weapons, and a pirate might want medium so they can have good weapons but low time to recharge).

It would take a rework of the battery stats, and it would turn the light battery into the fc battery, but it might make a good change. All batteries would be useful for different purposes, and traders would have a good battery for trading very quickly.