Can you tell us more about how you see the role of capital ships in the game? Do you see them as viable exploration, mining or trading vessels, suitable for diverse uses, or will they be strictly combat oriented?asked by Admiral
TL;DRChris Roberts says capital ships could serve many purposes beyond combat, such as trading and exploration, with mining possible via onboard smaller ships or modular add-ons, as long as the parts are available.
I think it depends on how you want to use it! Obviously some of the more combat-oriented capital ships are ideal for that role, but they also have cargo holds for trading, and exploration functions as they're armoured and are fairly self-reliant etc. So I definitely think you'll be able to use it for various purposes. Mining might be difficult, but seeing as they have their own hangars you could have smaller mining ships on board to do the work and just offload the cargo into the capital ship. You never know what add-ons we'll do, for the modular systems on the capital ships are huge, so there might be a mining laser and a processing plant or something.At the moment the Retaliator is serving as our modular prototyping ship, it's been built in such a way that you could maybe get rid of one of the torpedo rooms and change it to, say living quarters or cargo for example. I definitely think you could change a capital ship to do whatever you want to do as long as the parts are available.