About the upgrading to higher quality

[Psyko 9]

So, I recently found myself wanting to upgrade my cannons and hull on my ship.  As I made the new upgrades, I looked at them and other than the health there's no indication of the higher quality item.  I got to thinking about the whole process.  Why do I need to destroy the previous item to place the new one.  This game wants to call itself an MMO, and I'm assuming it's goal is a large audience.  So upgrading shouldn't be about destroying previous items, as many times it would destroy any connected items such as floors destroying my cannons.  I know you can 'layer" it on top, but you still have to technically destroy it.  Why not have additional materials to upgrade the common stuff you have installed to a higher quality item like fine, journeyman, etc.?

That leads me to the indication problem.  It looks exactly the same in the text and the appearance.  New people can get confused if they upgraded at all seeing only the hp increase.  They may feel it's not even worth upgrading, just keep plopping down commons.  Some sort of visual, rather it be a detail to the model, or "stats" and flavor text on the upgraded items to let people know that this is an upgrade.  Personally I'd rather see some sort of detail to the model, but understandably it would be difficult for now.  However the visual indication on the text would be good to have.  Also show how much of an increase in damage to the text.  Much like standard MMO gear stats shows differences by changing the color of text and showing stats.