We have recently been told that Drake ships do not have ejection seats. Can you settle a big debate: how does this square with the perma-death concepts envisioned in 'Death of a Spaceman'?asked by Deathstroke

On the Drake side, one of the ideas is Drake ships are ... we envision them a little like the Russian military hardware where it's like very rugged, it's functional, but doesn't have a lot of extra bells and whistles, say like the US military equipment would do. And so one of the things that generally you wouldn't necessarily get on a Drake ship would be all the extra stuff like the ejection seat, especially in something like the Cutlass but even more recently the Buccaneer. And that enables them to have ... to deliver value elsewhere like in ... better value for your money in terms of the weapons you get for the price and all the rest of the stuff.In terms of "Death of a Spaceman" I mean the thing to remember about "Death of a Spaceman" is that even though say your ... you get blown up ... like if your ship ... if you're in the ship and it gets blown up that doesn't mean that you're dead instantly because the way we look at the game is it is lives that you have. So you ... essentially if you eject, potentially you'll get in an escape pod, you can get out there and you ... potentially you can save your life. But any one of your characters before you move on to your next ... you have to move ... you put your old character away and move on to your new one which, whether it would be a designated next-of-kin or a whole new character you decide you want to move to, in that particular case you'll have quite a few opportunities ... you'll have more than one case where you "die" so to speak in space and then you'll wake up in the med bay and they've patched you up and then you'll only be able to do that so many times before obviously your body will give out. And that's kind of the idea of "Death of a Spaceman". It's like taking a bit of the "life" mechanic from the gold old days of early game design and that's the number of times you can be brought back by modern medical technology and then after that you have to ... your old character is passed away and you move onto a new character.So obviously it is a little bit more risky in a Drake ship than say a ship that has something like an ejection seat. Although you are able to get out of ... whether it's the Cutlass or whether it's even a Buccaneer, you should be able to get out just like you can get out and EVA out of certain ships like the Hornet and stuff. It's just a matter of you may not be able to get out quite a quickly so you'll just have to be aware of that but I think the people that fly Drake ships are so good they don't need to to always have to eject. Back in World War I they didn't give some of the airmen parachutes because they should be so good they didn't need to actually parachute out. I think that would probably be how we would think ... a Drake pilot would think of themselves as.So there you are. I hope that kind of answered the question. But we do definitely want to have this sense of different design criteria between our different ships. And so some ones are got more frills and more features but then they cost more. Some have less and so in some ways could be considered better value for money, easier to replace or easier to fix and that would definitely be Drake.