hey I know quite a bit about eve.. been playin since 2006. I also love sins and would love to see this mod happen. I can help you with a lot of the concept ideas for how the game mechanics of this mod should work. Some examples just off the top of my head would be:
1) When a ship spawns, give each ship its own countdown timer. When the timer ticks the ships get more powerful. this may lag the game out I don't know, would definitely have to be tested on large fleets to see about the lag factor. But really, each ship would be piloted by a pilot who has skills set to be trained, and it only makes sense that each ship would "level up" so to speak in a time based fasion to mimic the eve training regime. To reduce lag maybe make it possible for the frigates to hit lvl 2, cruisers lvl 3, HACS and T2 BC's to lvl 4, battleships lvl 5, and capital ships lvl 6. By the time you have a large fleet most of your ships would be leveled up anyway. This would elimitate a lot of the tech tree however, but would be a good way to fit eve into this game.
2) Frigate factory: Since the smaller factory in sins has the option to make 2 different ship classes, then you should have frigates and assault frigates in the first one, and cruisers, HAC's and battlecruisers in the second.
Capital Factory: You should have several slots to make different types of ships. Make T2 BC's, battleships, and capital ships (carriers and dreads).
Titan class ships: A titan class ship should be more like it's own mobile building. Instead of building a titan through the capital ship array, it should be purchasable as a planetary structure. This would give more realism to the sheer size of a titan since they are HUGE, and very rare. I'm not sure if this would work or not, but sins modders have done some very interesting thing with sins, and with sins it seems anything is possible (Arilou race from 7 deadly sins for example).
3) Speaking of titans, you can give them special abilities like a mobile repair facility, ship transport (can dock frigs and cruisers into it), media broadcasting centres (for broadcasting in hostile territory), setting up mobile starbases (or POS, if you choose to go this route), fabrication of frigates, and increase to surrounding ship weapons damage.
4) As you know, each race has their choice in weapons. Caldari = missiles/hybrids, gallente is hybrids, minmitar is hybrid/cannon, and amarr is lasers. Keep this in mind when you are figuring out what types of weapons your ships train up for. For example, a raven makes a great close range missle gank boat. Total destruction for pvp, extremely high damage. It can also act as a long range missile snipe boat. The player should be able to choose which way they want to train up their raven. Another good example is the gallente's Dominix. Makes an excellent drone boat, this ship should be able to run many drones, should offer drone link augments (increased drone damage and speed) and with little actual firepower, or makes an extremely damaging hybrid machine, specifically with blasters and speed upgrades, with still many drones but not the drone upgrades. A dominix with upgraded drones would offer an exciting way to lock down a gravity well, since drones would be able to go anywhere and would be powerful enough to act like the ship's weapons (I'm a fan of the domi). Also, for any ship, more than just your standard fighter and bomber drone, you could have a drone that depletes a ship's antimatter, or drones that can repair other ships, or drones that can inturrupt the targetting of an enemy ship, etc. There are many ideas involved in this.
5) The tech tree: Since I have stated that the ships themselves should be the tech, there are still several things that you can still train up for in the tech tree. Since weapon damage and armour/shield strength will be derived from the ships themselves being leveled up, you can turn to your tech tree more for fleet size, economical management, and so forth. For example, training up an item in the tech tree can allow your ships to train themselves to the given level. If your highest level trained ship can be 6 (for capital ships), then a branch in your tech tree would allow for the higher levels of training. For example, a weapons lab could allow all ships to train to lvl 1. A second weapons lab to lvl 2, a 3rd lab to lvl 3, so on. This would also make the players want to plant their labs down and get their fleet size increased. There are many factors in the tech tree with the individual ship based leveling system, but depending on what you go for. For example, you could have an entire branch in your weapons tree for each capital/battleship. So, say for the raven, if you want it to be a close range gank boat instead of long range, you would have tech branches for each setup, allowing you to select which way you want to take the setup of your larger ships. Also, you could have titans in the tech tree, so if you want to build a titan you need to have tech 7 and certain things like, structure build speed, structure hit points, broadcasting efficiency, trade ship upgrades and so forth (all economy based stuff), and then for the ship itself a T7 tech which actually unlocks the ship (military).
6) Going more into the economy tech tree, you could make it so that fleet sizes are capped in such a way that you may have 300 ships floating about, but you can only fleet say 50 of them if you have basic corp management. So in your economy tech, you could make a branch that deals with fleet sizes (not capacity) ranging from corp (small, 15- 20 ships) to alliance control (huge, 500+ ships). Trade ships could get a majour revamp, allowing them to also mine resources. In your mod, it may be possible to make an asteriod belt to be minable. So there are many options to make the game feel eve-ish.
If you like any of these ideas let me know this is just the tip of the iceburg. Like I said I can help greatly with concept ideas and know eve pretty good. Just send me a tell or e-mail me rancor26@hotmail.com. Hope you enjoyed some of these suggestions.
