4Game

–One and only one required roll per grade while at the engineer's workshop.

This is the tradeoff for making the trip versus pinning the blueprint. I realize that the immersion factor here is that you and the engineer are sort of working together to improve your ship.

But, there are currently 64k steam reviews for ED. Let's say, conservatively, there are 100,000 downloads. This would mean that each engineer, assuming a two ship per player average before the player found out about pinning the blue print has done the same upgrade 200,000 times. I don't think, for example Felicity Farseer is rolling the dice to upgrade the FSD range, pretty sure she knows what she's doing by now. So, therefore, 1 roll only when at the engineer's workshop.

–Place the materials within the radius of the arrival star and the nearest settlement, only.

I don't know why high grade emissions need to be 200,000 light seconds out in the void, but isn't the point of salvage to collect items left behind in a battle? Placing salvageable materials within the radius of the nearest settlement to the arrival star makes sense because it indicates where the shipping lane was at the time that ship was destroyed.

It makes more sense that priate attacks would occur in shipping lanes, because I can't imagine why imperial shielding can be found way out in deep space.

What happened there Frontier? What scenario were you trying to evoke by spawning imperial shielding way out there? Was it that a commander, having finally upgraded his Cutter to the fullest extent after thousands of hours, went mad from a wasted life, flew out into the void, and self destructed?

Let's prevent player grief, and make better design choices.