Chris Stanks

No, because it's got an interior walking space. But the canopy ejects. I'm pretty sure it works. It works on my machine.

So does that mean it's John's fault if it doesn't work in release?

No, it would be mine, because I would have got to change it to the correct setup. The answer is: find out tomorrow.

It is just the case that we're not actively choosing not to put LAMP on the new ships. I did a post on Spectrum about it a few weeks back that explains it's not a 'we're choosing to ignore LAMP', it's a 'this is how ships are built'. They're built one of two ways, and one way supports it out of the box. And the feature of LAMP needs to evolve to the next stage, and then it will apply to everything. When the code side of it works, they're already set up for LAMP. All the setups are there; they just don't work.

No fuel harvesting gameplay. Like I said, this is a starter, this is an introduction to refueling. It has all of the refueling features that the Starfarer has. It doesn't have the other stuff, it's just the refueling side of it. And a number of new improvements are coming to that gameplay. The process of refueling has gotten easier. You no longer have to open your nozzle and stuff like that. And they've added refueling beacons. At the moment, only NPCs come to respond to the beacons, but that'll continue to evolve like any other feature and push to more and more players. But refueling and medical gameplay are two of the loops that separate Star Citizen from a lot of stuff. I'm going to be real frank. They both need a lot of work. They both need some more development. Let's just get that out of the way. They're loops that aren't for you. It's like everything else. You understand bounty hunting is for you. You get the thrill of the hunt and the kill. Cargo and mining and salvage is for you. You're building your empire and amassing your fortunes. All the fighting, all the adventuring, all the industrial, it's all for you. But then there's medical, and there's refueling, which is just about helping your fellow citizen. That's really all it is. Nobody's going to get rich making refueling ships. It's just not going to happen. And nobody's going to get rich going out and patching people up. But it's such an amazing opportunity for Star Citizen gameplay to push beyond the more obvious things into this kind of altruistic thing. We need to be better at supporting it and to continue developing it, because there's something really special in both of these. And yes, this is the first step in refueling gameplay. Almost a decade at this point. So hopefully we continue to push this, because things like refueling and medical are really exciting to me, because it's nice to see somebody, you go to a Bar Citizen, like, oh, I'm a medic, I just play the game to help other people. And I love that. So I'm hoping if we keep pushing refueling gameplay, I'll start to hear, oh, I'm just a refueler. I just go and I just help people.

We got a few nice things changed when we looked at refueling again a little bit for the Starlight coming out, and it's resulted in a few benefits for the Starfarer: the pods got some more attention, some art cleanup, making them easier to get on and off both the Starfarer and the Starlight. We ended up changing how the nozzle worked. At the moment, you could change the nozzle on the Starfarer, but you could only do it through the VMA. But because we want the nozzles to be shared between them, we changed how the items were attaching, so you'll be able to change the nozzles between the Starfarer and the Starlight, and it just gave it a bit more time. But you're right, it does need more time, more development on it, because it's a really cool gameplay loop for someone that wants to do that.

No, definitely not. It's only a problem when there's too many of the same type. We obviously have, I forget the exact number now, but it's like 200-ish.

We're at 197 now, that have been announced and revealed so far.

If we had 197 light fighters, that's too many light fighters, I think. But when you spread it over all the careers, all the roles, all the progression within the roles, I think there's certainly room for plenty of them.

Would you still say that if there were 197 different manufacturers? Or 197 different styles of light fighter?

No, if there's 197 manufacturers and each of them wants to do a light fighter, then there's going to be some very close, similar attributes beyond visuals, but in that very specific instance, no, I don't think so.

I think that's what's right for Stanton as well, isn't it? A whole host of different manufacturers and a whole host of different roles. And not every manufacturer is going to deliver every role. And yeah, I think that's fine. I think there's also a lot of space in our universe for things that aren't necessarily straight off the production line. So we're bringing these new systems out, and you don't expect every system to have, oh, it's got a new manufacturer in it and it's got this, that and the other. But I think there's definitely scope for less official ships, so things that wouldn't necessarily fall under certain manufacturers, or they might have started out as a particular thing, but they've been retrofitted and kept alive over generations of...

Millennium Falcon kind of thing. Things that have been customised so much...

Can't even tell what it originally was. Junkers.

I agree with John. Even within subgroups, it's important to have even very similar ships to each other, because every manufacturer will do it a little bit different. Players for the most part have manufacturers they prefer and certain traits that manufacturers do compared to other ones. So certain ones might be more luxurious, more military, et cetera, et cetera. Having multiple of a similar type across multiple manufacturers, I think that's fine, because it gives people variation about what they want to pick. There's not one type of estate car in the world. There's not one type of sports motorbike in the world. There's variation because people like different things. So if we had 50 Argo single-seat mining ships, then absolutely. But having five or six across multiple manufacturers, they all bring little bits and pieces to the table.

So it is really under heavy active development at the moment. The physics team have done a lot of work in the last six months on it. We're now at a point where other feature and gameplay teams have joined them to work out the quirks with it. The vehicle content team have provided assets of ships set up in this new way of doing things. I should caveat this: it's not a vehicle thing. It's an everything thing. Every destructible system in the game will use this. So whilst everyone uses the vehicle example of bullets going through ships, it replaces the prop breakable system, it replaces the environment breakable system, it replaces the vehicle damage system. There's another one I forget. So environment teams, prop teams, vehicle teams, we're all working on this at the moment, with a bunch of use case scenarios that are with the engineers.

So it's more like an overall destructible physics system.

Yes. People have probably heard the word Maelstrom in various monthly reports and pieces. So that's the name of that overarching system.

It's the internal project name.

But it's more than just the physicalized damage for ships. It is a global destructible physics system. We're not going to sit here and commit to it being applied to every single element of Star Citizen. There's always going to be performance considerations. But you develop the system, and then you start to see where you can plug it in and apply it.

You'd find use cases for it. It'd be like a general system.