Can you talk a little bit about Drake's ease of repair and durability? How will this play out in the PU? Is there an advantage to being repaired with common materials when traveling far out beyond civilization?asked by Deadweight

So a big thing with that is just making sure that whatever components come stock on a Drake ship, and also even into the larger ships like the Caterpillar, wherever we stow these components and have to put the panel access, to make sure that it's very easy to understand. Okay, in the engine room of the Caterpillar, everything that you need to ensure propulsion, you're going to have some way to affect that from that one room. You aren't going to have to go running around from an engine room to a shield room to a computer room or anything like that. Onto the smaller ships, it's just making sure that the idea is you should be able to just pop the hood once and have access to 80%, 90% of the parts that you're going to have to work on, as opposed to having five, six different panels covering up the different parts.

Yeah, the Drake approach tends to be like everything's exposed and it's out there. But I think this also ties into some of the work that you've been doing on the component definitions, because certain components will... Like the difference between a high-class component, it might be the Jaguar of really good performance, but don't hit it with anything. Don't look at it wrong. Whereas you could have extremely high durability relative to lower performance. And you're more familiar with that system.

Yeah. People who have a lot of classic cars may understand this, where if you're taking care of your car, even if it's not the most powerful thing, you're able to get... I've heard of Honda Civics with 300-plus thousand miles on them. Most cars, you get about 100,000 before it starts shaking a bit. And so it's just having that built-to-last kind of thing, just easy access and not an overcomplicated mechanism. It's not some overly ornate engine or shield generator or power plant that will ever be in a Drake ship. It's going to be what it needs to function for what that function is made for. That doesn't sound confusing enough.

And repair is going to be tied in with reclaiming quite a bit, because we're going to need these resources that you're gathering. We're talking about stripping the hull off of derelict ships, and you gain those materials to then craft new components. There are sub-components to shove into a fuse. You make a fuse or something. This is in our design doc right now, so we're not in the implementation phase, but our hope is to have some gameplay where it's really fun to put these fuses in and make it work again. Maybe even think like a BioShock minigame or something. I don't know. The pipes.

It won't be pipes, but there will be something. But yeah, absolutely, the subcomponents are going to be a huge part of that, for also tuning and adding some character to your individual loadout. So even if we both had the same ship with the exact same manufacturer and line of parts, I could have all my subcomponents in those parts leaned, if I want to, say, focus more on energy cooldowns, making sure all my systems are back up and replenishing faster, where yours may be just raw output, raw performance. You want the biggest number on the power plant output, the biggest number on the shield health output.

We've been looking to have those subcomponents tied directly into the behavior and performance of that component. So you'll have your base stats that is the item itself, but then when you put the subcomponents in, or you alter out the subcomponents that it already comes outfitted with, that will shift that balance a little bit. You can think of it like those are the points that you can move around on your stat sheet. But you can bolster it a little bit towards this performance or that, depending on what you need. If you need more durability on this high-performance, low-durability component, a subcomponent might be a good way to do that. They're also the easiest as far as a field repair, because you just remove a thing and put a new thing in. So that gives you an element of that consumable for repair.