I kind of anticipated your reply, and I totally understand. For future reference, if I were to rank my preferences on the options I suggest in this thread, I'd say roboport buildings or tank-vehicles would be my first and second choices, respectively.
It occurs to me that one possible way you might be able to balance this mod is to make it so that higher-tier gear (i.e. shield mk2) would only be togglable in some quantity smaller than a stack. For example, blue belts stack to 100. To discourage a player from quickstarting with blue belts, you can say that blue belts granted by this mod would be limited to 10 or fewer. My logic behind this is that it would force a player, a player savvy enough to worry about game-start inventory slots available, that that only uses ten percent of an inventory slot's capacity of a full stack, but having any blue belts in his inventory takes a slot away from something that might be more meaningfully useful at early game, such as an extra stack of ammo for a deathworld, or a car-vehicle.