Calling All Devs - Tractor Beams & Space Stations

It's not something we want to do at the moment. Not saying we're not going to do it ever again. We've got these things sort of working internally, but something working internally in development is quite often a long way away from being player facing and player ready. So until everything that we've got, so the Retaliator modules, the Endeavor modules, getting those working and in people's hands and playing with them, we don't want to do more, just because it's just piling more unknowns on an unknown.

This is a good time to remind folks. One of the topics we covered in, I believe, the very first episode of Calling All Devs was the difference between our internal modular system and the player-facing modular system. While we've got internal modularity going, the modular system that will be player-facing, that you guys will use to swap out modules for the Endeavor and the Retaliator, is not online. It's not scheduled to come online in 2018, although, of course, we are always reevaluating our schedule and priorities, especially remember that there is a survey going on right now for just that very purpose. So who knows? But right now, until that system comes online, we don't necessarily want to compound it and add to it until we know precisely how it's going to work.

So we are working on this. The first tractor beam that will make it into the game right now is a very weak tractor beam that we use very specifically for mining and extracting chips of rock from the deposit you're mining. You will not be able, sadly, to use this for moving cargo and other purposes or, I don't know, pushing players around or other ships for now, because we want to keep it limited to its purpose for now. But we are looking into getting all the other ships that require a proper tractor beam equipped with one. There are some problems there that right now we're looking into. We're looking into what happens when two players, two or more players actually try to move a single box. What happens when you try to shoot an EVA player with it? And all these things. There are some abuses that players can do with this technology, and we need to have ways of mitigating that. We don't want to stop it. We think limited abuse is part of the gameplay and it's part of the fun of a game, but it can't be something where you continually hold someone hostage there forever and ever and they cannot play the game. So we are definitely looking into this.

The idea is to have a... you can consider it a beam weapon, although it doesn't do damage, where you focus on the item you want to attract or move around, and you connect to it, you grab onto it, and you can move it left, right, wherever you want. You can push it, you can pull it, depending on what you need. So you can use it to pull, let's say, cargo crates. Let's say you're a pirate, you just destroyed a big hauler, and there's all these nice juicy floating SCU boxes in space. You will just sit in your ship safely and point your tractor beam towards them and pull them into your cargo bay. Or the other way around, I'm a hauler and I need to transfer my cargo to another hauler. I would just take my tractor beam and move stuff from my cargo towards their cargo. It just speeds up the process. Again, mining will require tractor beams. We're looking right now into the Orion, because the Orion is more of a space mining platform where basically once you blow something up, you blow up a chunk of rock, there'll be pieces flying in every direction. So you have to be really quick with your tractor beam and stop them from getting away. It's basically money just flying away, which you don't want. So we definitely want to do this.

Regarding the power of a tractor beam, it's in the same idea as all of our items. If you invest more power into it, they become more powerful. The range increases. You get all these benefits, but you risk frying it. You risk frying parts of your ship. There are risks involved. That's kind of the idea with the tractor beam, but it's still in the works. Not everything is final here.

So we're also looking into allowing players to put them on maybe a ship that's not initially thought of with a tractor beam. Let's say you have a smaller ship and you need to have more of a utilitarian purpose to it. And maybe the thing we're looking into right now is allowing the player to remove one of their weapons or one of their missile bays or one of the turrets and equip a tractor beam turret. They will lose some firepower, but it will allow them to have other functions in the game rather than just pew-pewing everyone. So they might be able to assist in a mining operation or work as a hauler, a mini hauler between two Hulls, for example.

So when you say we're looking into, that's not something that we're committed to yet?

No. We are looking into it. If it works and it doesn't break other things in the game and it's worth doing, then yeah, we'll move right on that. Like everything, it needs to be proven, it needs to be fun, it needs to not break the existing gameplay.

I will say it's being considered, but we're talking far future at this point. We would love to have that, but again, we're talking tech, we need to find again the right amount of how much do we do. We don't want to allow the player to put station next to station next to station and just create unlivable space. But we like this idea of the player... how we want them to own a piece of land, we like the idea of allowing them to settle somewhere at the edge of the galaxy, I don't know, somewhere close to a sun corona, put a science station there, where they can run some experiments using whatever quality that sun provides. There's a lot of scientific slash maybe manufacturing or extraction possibilities, like extracting various materials in a certain area where you would drop a station, and that station constantly harvests stuff. There are possibilities here. So, yes, but we're really talking not the near future.

No, to use an American idiom, we're several carts before the horse.

Yep, pretty much.

Short answer is no. Long answer is not at this time. There's just higher priorities. The Ship Shape information exists in video format. So the work to build something out on the website would be additional work to get you guys stuff that you already have in video format. We've got a limited web platform team. They've got a number of priorities for 2018: integration of Spectrum chat and stuff into the game, the Voyager Direct melting, all the various pledge promotions that go on throughout the year, a revamp to the pledge store itself, and a couple other things that are farther down the line. Basically, it's a pretty low priority. There's other things that would affect more people and more immediately, and the information that it would be presenting if we did do the work is already available elsewhere. So, not in the cards for any time soon.