Steven "Toast" Kam

A lot of the starter ships don't come with jump drives, but they can all equip them. I think pretty much everything's going to have a jump drive. They may not come with it, though.

I think this was a Rob Irving thing that we're just not going to think about again. We'll talk more about jump drives. Either way, every ship can do it. Every non-snub ship can mount a jump drive.

Yes. So whether it comes with one or not, you'll be able to pick one up in... what's the ship store in our world?

Astro Armada. I've seen this question all over the place about jump drives and stuff, and I think the general rule is, if a ship has been offered as a companion ship to something else, it doesn't have a jump drive. So the Argo supports the Idris and doesn't have a jump drive. The Merlin supports the Constellation and doesn't have a jump drive. The 85X comes with the 890 Jump. So if it was sold as a standalone by itself, it probably does.

Or maybe you'll even get a used jump drive at Dumper's Depot. And of course you'll have to upgrade your jump drive over time. You may have a double and then you want to go to a quad jump drive or something. Or one that's stealthy or more efficient. So there are all sorts of upgrades in the future. I know what people are thinking; I know what Rob was thinking back then. It is a fantastic moment in the original Privateer when you have finally saved up 10,000 credits, you make your first jump out of the Troy system, and you get your ass beaten down because the rest of the universe is very, very harsh. Our universe is not necessarily built exactly the same way, so it may not be as much of a moment to earn that first jump. I think it is going to be a moment; the first jump during the build-out of Crusader in the PU is going to be a huge, huge event. But I don't know about scraping by to earn your jump drive.

All regular-sized ships will have a quantum drive.

Yes. Anything that's not a snub will have a quantum drive.

No, we're not confirming grabby hands for any patch.

We're not confirming anything for any patch. I think the closest we'll say is that it's most likely EVA for 2.2. But it's all going to come down to that one day in February where we sit down and we say, okay, here's everything that's done and ready for the patch, here's what's not, which includes EVA or not, X ship or not, Y ship or not, and we will let you know when we know, essentially. A lot of people on the forums are like, well, why don't you tell us what's coming? There are two reasons. One is that when it's not certain, people get mad. That has been a constant for all of time. And the second is that we don't know. We have 300 people working on 70 different things at once. Some will be in 2.2, 2.3, 2.4. So there's a specific day when we know more, and when that happens, we'll tell you guys.

It's not always easy to predict whether or not something like this is going to be done. Computer science is a very young discipline compared to almost everything else humanity has done for centuries. We haven't done this for even one century yet. So knowing exactly how long something is going to take when your discipline keeps changing every day is very, very difficult. It's not like bricklaying, it's not like farming; it just changes all the time.

Especially depending on what part of the game it is. Physicalized EVA is just such a huge... it's not a factory line. It's not a factory where you say, OK, it's going to take six days to do this. It involves a lot of experimentation, breaking things, getting it right. So while we say, OK, we want it done at this point, it's quite possible it will be done much later, or sometimes much earlier, like the procedural planets. For other things, such as ships, it's a little bit easier to predict. We've made five dogfighters now, so for the sixth one we can get a pretty good estimate. But even then, there are plenty of times when the artist hands it off to the designer and they're like, wait a minute, you need to redo this and this and this because they don't work. And that changes the timeline.

About the only time something is easy to predict in programming is if you've done the exact same thing before. But there's a lot in this game that no one has ever done before.

How do you predict how long it takes to do something that's never been done before, in a way that's never been done before, and present it in a way that's never been done before?