Has there been any consideration of a future option that would allow people to improve a ship's hull armor strength beyond the factory default?

Yep. So armor is going to be a swappable item on the ships in the future. It's sort of there as something that functions on the Hornet series. The Tracker or the Ghost, one of them, has an armor that's different to the others. And that is an item that is not a visible item, but it's an item that adjusts the functionality of the armor behavior. And that's something we want to do for all ships in the future. And it can do anything from what armor does best, in reducing damage; we can change that by damage type, so you could choose to have an armor that is better against energy weapons at the expense of something else, or you can have one that is better at absorbing signals from yourself so you're harder to spot, which is what the Tracker or Hornet Ghost does. What's stopping us from really pushing ahead on that is we want to then have a visual change, because having stuff that just changes some numbers behind the scenes isn't that exciting, whereas if you put the item on and your ship visibly changes, that's much nicer. But the art guys are really, really hesitant to take their lovely ships and just cover them with armor plates as a visual styling. So it's sort of doing rounds of look dev every now and then to go, how can we convey this thing without making it look like an Abrams with ceramic armor all over it.