Ship Printer as a Device

I know that when we get block welders and pistons, we can build ship printers to weld the blueprint holograms. That is excellent, and there's always a need to make your own custom grid printer.

However, why not also have a block device for building blueprint holograms? The purpose would be to make it easy and convenient for new players, and give them a stepping stone in ship printing, and help them transition to building their own, improved versions? Would also be good for old players for "standard" ship printing.

The key in making this "Ship Printer" device is to make it:

- Come in tiers so that there's a progression path to improved versions of it

- Have the first tier be available early in the game

- Limited in capability so that there's still need to build your own better custom versions

Easiest way to achieve the above is to make the device limited in size. That is, in addition to the devices control and storage part, it would also have a framed area, and the blueprint hologram must fit inside that frame. Usually ships are longer than they are wide, so we could have, for example:

Tier 1 Printer: 10m x 10m x 20m (i.e. 4x4x8 large blocks)

Tier 2 Printer: 15m x 15m x 30m (6x6x12 large blocks)

Tier 3 Printer: 20m x 20m x 40m (8x8x16 large blocks)

That should be large enough for making the device useful, but still limited enough that you would want to make custom designs to build bigger blueprints. The Tier 1 version should be large enough to allow building small early game ships, I think.

Using the Ship Printer device would then be selecting a blueprint in its control panel, which then shows up inside the framed area. You would then load up all the components needed to build the hologram, which the device would list for you. Once all there, you press a Big Red Button, and the device builds the hologram with some fancy moving industrial robot arms or other nice suitable animation.

I think this kind of device would increase the accessibility to new players, be a quality-of-life help for experienced once, and overall improve the play-ability, while still keeping you wanting for more, and thus wanting to make an improved version of your own.