With Salvage on the Roadmap for the end of the year, what're we expecting the initial roll-out to look like as far as gameplay goes? And what technical hurdles do we have to overcome before we can start seeing some of the systems in the Reclaimer come online?

The big hurdles are the Physical Inventory that they talked about, and also Player Interaction regarding character-based salvaging (like salvaging components by removing them from their slots). One hurdle that the Art Vehicle Team has is that there are debris entities created when a ship is destroyed, and right now when that happens they take the item, move it over, and then it's magically moved - it doesn't have any pipe connections or persistent info, so it'll just spawn, vanish, and that's it. They need a more robust system to keep them there, to extract items, and then maybe also the resources on those debris pieces. Otherwise, if you blow up a ship and look inside it looks like an empty husk, and maybe a seat is floating. Ships spawn with Object Containers inside of the ship, and they want those to remain when a ship turns into a debris piece, but there are some tech limits on why they don't. So if you were to put a Big Benny's inside a Cutlass and it then explodes, you'd want them, or any other items that were inside, to still be there. As such, they have to solve how they're going to keep those, and transfer those Object Containers and what's inside them to the debris pieces, so that whatever mechanic is used, Players could extract those things outside of the debris piece or turn chunks into some sort of commodity. Mark Abent has seen prototypes of the mining laser being used to extract salvage, but that's just a "what if we did this" situation and not final. Really, it's unclear what Salvage will look like and what hurdles there will definitely be. Even if Salvage ends up being "mining ships" at the least that will be the first iteration for Players to try out, before the Devs get something more complicated out.