Re-equip any ship

Have you seen the "Design Ship" option in the Ship Yard and the Upgrade function for ships? What are you missing that is not available already?

@Franton, I agree with OP, "any" ship is what he said. At this time mercenary, commander and salvaged ships are not upgradable, we also should be able to upgrade ships to a different size, at a high cost in a shipyard. Right now ship upgrades are useless, it is easier and cheaper to just build new which means losing all the experience gained by the crews, another option would be the ability to recycle the crew to a new ship of any size thereby retaining the experience points.

Ok, I only have crusade and wasn't aware of ships that are not upgradable.

I do agree that upgrade costs are ridiculously high (and that is even when not considering special resources - see my recent bug report in the support forum). But in the games I've played so far, by the time it became an option, Tourism income was so high it didn't matter. I've yet to try this with 3.7 though: toursim was supposed to be rebalanced there. If so, it would be about time to bring down rush build and upgrade costs to a reasonable level.

I also agree that 'losing' crew experience is bad. I like the idea of maintaining ship crews and assigning them to new ships rather than having them stay on outdated designs that might end up as cannon fodder. But I fear that this may not be easy to implement.

Personally I do agree that upgrading standard ships is too expensive, hardly worth it, with few exceptions (upgrading sensor ships, transporters or colony ships to longer range, better sensors or engines is not expensive - it's more about the combat vessels)

I'm a bit more sceptic on the "upgrade _anything_" issue - I mean if you can turn mercs into anything this would probably collide with some of them being over-capacity (I think), which could be OP if upgraded further.