Yup, it’s time for one of those. My question today is - can a ship provide armour and engines built in, or can it only give bonuses to the ones that the player gives it?
as far as i know, there is only bonuses.
it is, however, a great suggestion 
Indeed, and as new races got added to GSB it’s a feature I wish I had built in from the start, but alas no, it’s not currently an option 
Would it be hard to implement? Say, in the hull file have a new section which just gives a list of module names that are included by default (and not removable presumably).
or nother value could be added to the slots.´
Example:
[slots]
0 = 41.00,177.00,BUILTIN,(name of module),
the trouble with this is the simple fact that it would involve Cliffski to dive into the code, rewrite it to accept the commands and then work out the bugs of the change. Sure it is possible, BUT the time taken from development of his new game would be too great. Or if he is working on the change on the side of the new game then the new update will take a long time to finish and debug.
I wish i was more knowledgeable that i was able to plug out games like Cliffski can. But I am in college to learn how it is done and all. I would ask to help with programing but I feel that Cliffski would like to keep it simple and small to witch I understand.
Anyway my $0.02 on this subject I meant there is a lot of neat features that would be nice to put into the game. But Cliffski is moving on to the next game.
well what if there was a plug-in feature? I think that might take more time, but think about it, it would make modding have even more possibilities. And it wouldn’t make existing modding any harder, it just adds a new level.
This is why I posed the question (to Cliff) of “Would it be hard to implement?”. I was hoping for an answer of “sure, that’ll take me a couple hours, I’ll have the patch out next week”. Of course, I’m expecting an answer more like “none of the infrastructure is there to support that, and it doesn’t help anyone except a small subset of modders, so I can’t justify it”.
Sigh
I hope someday, somehow Cliff could impliments this idea - I already see myself modding the existing ships that have the weapons as part of the graphics and making them active weapons
I’m not saying just that you are unable to do that, Sure I did BUT I also stated that Cliffski has decided to move on to the next game and stop working on GSB as much as we hate to hear that. I’m not sure we will be able to talk him into remaking the code for a game that he said he didn’t want to work on in depth. HE has stated many times that he will KEEP UPDATING GSB. But as far as new content that is up to the modding community. There are a LOT of things I would like to see in-game like:
The ability to make NEW ship classes.
The ability to limit the firing arcs of weapons, So that You are able to use Graphical guns on ships that only fire forward.
The ability to add explosions into the editor.
The ability to have unmovable equipment installed on the hull.
As with some others that I KNOW I am forgetting.
But I know that unless Cliffski lets someone see his code, IE hires a second person to help him with the programing I feel unless he decides to hold off new game development I think that the stuff that a lot of people are asking for will not happen.
Sorry if that pops your bubble, but i feel that this is the truth. Or my version of the posts I have seen from Cliffski on this manner of new features.
I’ve already accepted that. In fact, for several of those features I was the one saying that the workload would be beyond what Cliff would be willing to put in at the current time 
On the other hand, he has added a few new features for us (multiple weapon sounds being one of the most recent). So as long as it’ll only take a very short time to implement, he may be willing. As I don’t know what will be simple to add given the current code, I can hope