Hey guys! Great show last week! With the new modular ship system coming, have the old upgrade slots been replaced by the new system? Or are they used more for system upgrades like CPU, sensors and cooling?asked by Buzz Killington

This is actually a good thing you asked this question. There may-... it sounds like from the question there may be a little bit of a misconception about the modular system. If you remember back to say, the Cutlass and the... what did they call it? Did they call it "Cutlass-gate" or something like that? Anyways, the idea behind the modular system is you can already swap out coolers, avionics, motherboards, I mean that's something the system already supports. So the additional functionality of the modularity system is to swap out whole internal blocks, right - so the innards of the ship.Without saying too much about the variants for upcoming ships, what this allows you to do is, say if you have something that's a cargo bay you can... maybe on a variant it's a medical bay, or maybe on another variant... well, use the Cutlass example - maybe on another variant it's for transporting prisoners. With the modular system what it allows you to do is basically, if the ship's designed right and the internal architecture is designed right, you can remove out the cargo bay and swap it for the prisoner transport part. And then if you have larger and larger ships, like say up to an Idris, or a Javelin, or a Hull-C or something like that... or a Carrack for example had it's little modular bits... you can start removing whole rooms and replacing them with other rooms, so you can further customize the role and capability that your ship can perform. So it's not so much about items it's about whole parts of the-... not parts of the ship, but ROOMS of the ship - parts of the ships that can support, you know, multiple items inside them, or gameplay inside them. So that's the idea.

Another facet of that is, going back to the motherboard and CPU of a ship's computer, there's going to be modularity to a certain degree on those, such as a motherboard that can handle greater data throughput, or certain apps that you can get for the computer that can lock on to more targets, or has faster locking speed, or maybe have better infrared spectrum signature detection.

Yeah, and what he's saying is completely true, and one of the things that we actually have set up on all the ships right now are a separate targeting computer, a separate avionics computer, a separate CPU. And the CPU can best be thought of as your power plant for your ship, but for the data pipe. So the three pipes we have on the ship - it's the data pipe, which is powered by the CPU, the power pipe that's powered by the power plant, and the heat pipe which is not really powered by anything but is provided into by the weapons and anything else you have attached to the ship - engines, etc. So, yes, for example in 1.0 you'll see the Willis Ops custom targeting computer for example, allows you to dock more simultaneous targets in your... oh, Zane's going to kill me if I don't get this right... "target overview context pane". So, you know, decreased missile lock times... it's all these different kinds of behaviors that fall out of that system. And that's something that we have not-... we on the item manufacturing and design side, have not done a great job of showing off that system very well. You'll start to see it in 1.0, but as we start adding more and more options, and items and components, it'll become much more a part of everyday gameplay.