How often do the forum critiques of designs by backers, who are actual armaments experts, aerpspace engineers, physicists, combat shooters, etc... make it into the final form of an in-game ship, firearm, or other artifact?asked by Dreamrider

Quite a bit I think! We do integrate a lot of feedback that we get from experts in various fields, but at the same time because it's a science-fiction world there is a certain amount of suspension of belief involved. For example, the Vanguard is a swing-wing spacecraft, in terms of aerodynamics, it doesn't matter if it's a swing-wing or not, but we gave it a purpose anyway, because it looks cool and we wanted to have it in-game. Same thing with a torpedo, traditionally it's a projectile launched underwater, so it might retain its fins in space, but they don't really do anything. So while expert critique does factor into our decisions, we have to make it fun, and if a really realistic sim gets in the way of that, I'd rather go with the fun route.

Yeah, it's the same with what was pointed out on the retaliator, based of his feedback on the original behring marksman, that the torpedos look a lot like Mark 48's, and don't have any thrusters on them for attitude adjustment, so we should probably add thrusters on them. The other hard thing about the internet is that a lot of our forum community ARE armaments experts or engineers, but it is also the internet. I mean, when I'M on the internet I'm a soldier of fortune for example.

And I know a lot about physics. I got to teach the art team about gravity for example. No seminar yet, couple of weeks.