A question about the design process itself in regards to heavily modular ships like the Caterpillar, Endeavor, and the Hull Series. How do you go about sketching out the game mechanics that revolve around the module's themselves? do you all sit around in a conference room throwing around ideas to see what might and what might not work? Are there any balance consideration with ships that can effectively change their entire make-up from heavy combat to mostly harmless... or repair and medical to pure hauling? Or do you just let mass and power limitations govern what players can and can't do?asked by Deadweight

We do actually design each module for a purpose we do sometimes sit around in a conference room and we also do have a lot of design considerations that we put into it. And sometimes we have the power of limitations govern what the design is based on whether its OP, whether it's functional. But the main thing is each ship is completely different. In the case of the Caterpillar we put a lot into what it was intended to do.The original intent was search and rescue then we started looking at some of the other ones like the variants which the possibility of variants were the merchant marine and small scale salvage then we started looking at what does a search and rescue need. So search and rescue you need a medical bay. Boom you got a medical bay check. You need a place to house the crew as well as your medical crew so bam there's an extra personnel one there and then you need cargo just in case, you also need launch bays so that way you can get people launched out to go save people and stuff. So kind of like this like the dive rescuersKirk Tome: Sure. I think what we're describing though is the whole top down approach. First the ship functions itself is determined and then once we determined the particular type of function then we design the module so that it will serve that function and what those needs are for that particular module. So we keep diving down deeper to try to figure out, because for us as designers we're determining what the player interactions with the ships are and therefore to accomplish those particular tasks that the ship is suited for what works best as far as the components in this case the modules on that shipRV: Also feasibility. Because I made a couple of modules or designed and specced some and people were like "hmmm I don't know if that would work" or "we need to tone that down". Just to make sure it wasnt crazy over powered.

Tell them about some of the examples that have been designed out so far.

We have the medical bay, we have the cargo bay we have some of the personnel bays and we have multiple variants even of the different modules themselves so like we have two different cargo modules.

What are the differences?

One of the cargo modules has a cat walk so you would lose about 15-20 SCU for the catwalk but because it's a catwalk you can walk through the entire cargo and get to the entire ship. Cause if you fill an entire bay with cargo then you can't walk through it. So if you wanted to get to the other side of the ship basically you have to either exit the ship to go back in through a different dock or something like that. The player can set up the ship how ever they want and based on what modules they choose for their ship they have to deal with the consequences of ok this is what this has for strengths and this is what this module does.

That's good. There are positives and negatives to each type and players will determine what's best for themRV: Or the ones you're playing with. Everyone's talking about pirates so we're talking about more attack more aggressive type of modules to add to it and also the ones that you won't let go but the cargo still has hardpoints on it. So each side of the bay has tractor beam hardpoints like size ones so if you wanted to you could swap those tractor beams out for like two size ones so you could pew pewKT: I wouldn't I would stick with tractor beamsRV: You never know people want to put guns on the bays and cargo bays. Let them do it have fun. good luck. You guys can come up with other ways to use this stuff; awesome because emergent gameplay is something, we really just want to let them have the toy and see what they do with it.