Factorio update 2.1 will greatly expand platform based logistics. It might be beneficial to consider allowing creation of multiple platforms in order utilise those changes.

In order to achive that I'd suggest the following:
- make the platforms buyable maybe but not necessarly with an increasing cost
- change speed calculation to noticeably factor in weight not just width to encourage ship classes (eg. miner, transport, factory, orbital storage) single ship gameplay should still be possible but more difficult due to thrust issues
- secondary "planet orbit" locations for simpler automated focused mining
- possibly new location in the middle between 4 inner planets. A research or reputation locked trade hub/space station with routes leading to it being 25% longer than inner planet routes to encourage avoiding it by automatic pathfinding (lore explanition would be lack of gravity assist on approach due to low mass). It could offer special trades, new ship construction, mixed quests, whatever you want.

Thank you — it's clear you're thinking in whole systems rather than isolated tweaks. I'll answer each point honestly, including the parts I won't be doing.

Multiple platforms — no, and this is the most fundamental "no". A single ship that is your base is the mod's core bet, not a sign of something unfinished. Everything else follows from it: why you can't build on planets, why there are no rockets, why losing the ship is frightening. A fleet of specialised vessels would be a good game, but a different one, and building it on top of this would mean rewriting the UI, the missions, the trading and the hold — and ending up with a mod that makes this one redundant.

One observation about 2.1. The logistics expansion there is built almost entirely on the "planet → rocket → platform" chain — smarter planet requests, mixed rocket payloads, drop slots. We have no rockets at all and no way to lift cargo off a surface, so of that whole package essentially only platform-to-platform transfers in the same orbit apply here. The payoff from multiple ships is therefore much smaller in this mod than in vanilla.

Speed and weight — you're right in substance, with one correction. The vanilla acceleration formula does already account for weight: it sits in the denominator. But weight has almost no effect on top speed — only through the 1 + weight/10,000,000 factor, which at realistic masses amounts to a few percent. Top speed is set by thrust balancing drag, and drag scales with width. Hence the vanilla meta of long, narrow ships — your diagnosis is accurate.

That formula is an ordinary utility constant, and a mod can rewrite it in a single line, so there's no technical obstacle. But in our case a weight penalty hits the wrong target: our ship is required to be heavy — it's a factory, a warehouse, a greenhouse and living quarters all at once. Penalising weight means penalising the very idea of playing with one ship. Ship classes make sense when you have several ships — which makes this proposal inseparable from the first one.

Planet orbits for focused mining — same reason. A dedicated mining ship parked in orbit only makes sense with a fleet. Here, resources come from the route, and sitting still means not playing.

The trade hub in the middle, though — that's an excellent idea, and I'm noting it down seriously. It's the only one of the four that requires neither a second ship nor changes to flight physics, and it fits exactly onto what the mod already has: markets with different stock per location, reputation, missions, research-gated access. Routes a quarter longer so automatic pathfinding avoids it is an elegant solution, and the gravity-assist explanation appeals to me. Special stock and its own missions would sit very well there. I won't promise a timeline, but it goes onto the candidate list in exactly that shape.

Thanks for the analysis — it's useful even where my answer is "no".

I agree that one platform rule directs gameplay very well and adding more will drasticaly change it. Instead I'll ask this:

(Currently I have no intention of doing this but this is an idea for a future 2.1 save.)
I was thinking of doing a co-op where every player has their own platform so they can specialize and trade resources/manufactured products.
-Are your scripts safe to work with multiple platforms or will something break and cause issues?
-If I spawn in a platform will it work with your scripts or do you need to "prime" it in order to interact with your custom features?

Sidenote. If your code is multiplatform safe, planet orbits are not implemented and it seems beneficial I will look into adding orbital mining locations myself to see if they work well or I end up ignoring them anyway in favor of mixed mining since trade hub should provide "clean" routes by itself.

I checked this specifically — I ran a second platform in a test build: it was created, the mod sees it, and it ran for several minutes of game time without a single error.

No priming needed. The mod never holds a reference to a "main ship": every function walks the surfaces, picks out the ones that have a platform, and filters by force. State is keyed by platform index or by player, and money and cargo are simply items in the hold — so each ship has its own by definition.

What stays shared across the team: contracts (one active per planet), reputation, the stock on the counter and its refresh timer. For co-op that seems right to me, actually — a shared market and a shared queue of orders.

There's one catch: how to create that second platform at all. Bringing back the starter pack recipe isn't enough — the pack isn't assembled in place, it's launched by a rocket silo from a planet's surface. And we have neither a silo nor any construction on planets. Getting a platform the legitimate way would mean undoing three of the mod's load-bearing restrictions at once. So that leaves the console — or a button of your own in a small companion mod: the platform gets created directly, without breaking anything in the design.

Trading between ships is already doable in 2.0 — through the counter: one sells goods to a planet, the other buys them from that same planet. And if 2.1 brings platform-to-platform transfers in the same orbit, then directly as well.

How about 1 platform per player option so everyone can but not must get one if they please?

I'd rather not add a second platform inside the mod. One ship is the rule the whole design leans on — money, cargo, contracts and the market all assume there's a single hold everything passes through. Once each player has their own ship, that assumption goes, and it isn't one setting: contracts are one per planet for the whole force, so several ships would need the whole economy rebalanced, and there'd be the question of what happens to a ship when its player stops playing.