Ship explosions don't inherit the ship velocity and, as a result, tend to hang in front of the attacker like a deadly wall of death fire. Any chance pursuit kills can be a little less risky? Also, will explosions take into consideration the loadout of the exploding ship?asked by John Smallberries

You might be talking about the... We have an issue with debris right now where it no longer has physics when it detaches from the ship in the current build. It's going to be part of the Item 2.0 upgrade that we're currently in progress on. So we will get physics back on the debris items so they won't hang in space. But I think right now you can just pass right through those debris items and they won't kill you. But as for an explosion effect, the ship leaving the explosion behind, there's ways we can attach those effects to stay with the ship as those effects fire. So we'll be looking at reviewing effects. So part of what I'm doing right now is assessing our whole fleet of ships, all 30-odd ships that are out there flying right now, and looking at all the missing pieces of tech, tech that could be improved, and just making sure everything is set up in the same way. And as each new piece of code gets written from engineering, we have to go back and kind of redo a lot of the ships. And as you can imagine, as ships get added, that iteration through the entire fleet becomes a little longer each time.

And for the second part about the different components, we're now tying explosions into the individual components and such now, right?

We are starting to do that. Again, Item 2.0 is going to allow us to do the radial damage with effects on nearby components, and then through power pipes and overheating, and then kind of a buildup. That cool video we showed a while back with the explosion, we're still working toward that as our visual and the feel. So you're going to have time to repair during a critical phase of the ship and bring it back down to a nominal level.

The goal is that that's not just the death mask, that's the result of the systems behaving according to the situation you've put it in. The damage that you took, the amount of damage, the type of damage, what you've done about it since then is what leads to that behavior.

And also just how you're running your ship, where even without damage, if you're running it basically redlining everything, you're going to wear your ship down and all your stuff down faster, because you're just pushing it so much harder than it's safely rated for.

You should also be able to equip your ship with safer components. Generally probably a lower output, but will be less likely to explode, or if it does explode, will probably be less devastating to your ship. These are all choices you can make.

So yet another thing that Item 2.0 will allow us to do in the future. So not stuff that you're going to see front facing in 2.4. One of the bigger things with 2.4 is the item port system. It's an under-the-hood implementation that's going to allow us to build out everything from components to explosions. It affects so many aspects of the game. It's one of the more exciting aspects of 2.4.