One of my favorite parts of Star Trek was watching the crew come up with interesting ways to use their non-combat equipment to trick, distract, disarm or otherwise overcome more heavily-armed or numerous opponents. That said, will science-oriented vessels like the Carrack be able to use their non-combat equipment in novel ways against aggressors, beyond their standard applications?asked by RandomTask
TL;DRElectronic countermeasures and modular systems are being built into some ships, but he isn't sure the Carrack will have such features, though he thinks modular plug-in systems are likely there.
Good question, I think we're definitely building in the idea for electronic countermeasures etc, we have certain ships in development that have specific systems to allow that to be one of the things you can do as crew. I'm not so sure that those features will be necessary or present on the Carrack, but we are making the bigger ships capable of heavy modular customisation, so you could plug-in and use different tech on different ships etc. The two prototyping ships we'll be using for that new tech are the Avenger and the Cutlass to start with, which is being handled by the UK studio at the moment, and it's pretty cool stuff, can't wait to show you guys. Even the Hornet or the Aurora's functionality comes from the items that are plugged in at any given time, they both have a radar item, they both have CPU etc, that runs a targeting computer, lights, weapons, missiles, shield generators, thrusters, power-plant, cooling systems, all of which "plugs in" via the pipe system and balances between each other to create a ships's systems as a whole. The same would go for an ECM station, which might need power and CPU cycles, but would provide electronic warfare functionality. You'll probably be able to plug in modular systems like that on the Carrack, although I can't say 100%, but the general systems are there and we ARE planning on the modularity. In AC 1.0 we run signatures now, so you create these signatures based on your systems present in the pipeline, so you might be able to hide these behind an asteroid, or turning down your power etc, which will make it much harder for a radar to detect you or a missile to lock on. I think all of this will allow for much more varied gameplay options rather than just straight-up combat which'll be cool.