What role will fuel play in the PU, particularly in the lawless regions? Will access to fuel be something organizations fight over in order to reach the most remote and valuable reaches of space?asked by Beer4TheBeerGod

So on the fuel side, definitely the plan is fuel in terms of boost, in terms of your maneuvering jets - that is a finite thing that you have, that you have to either stock up, or you could could get a scoop and go into a gas giant and process into fuel. Haven't 100% decided whether there is another level of just general propellant fuel for your normal engines, and if you don't have that then, perhaps you can just drift at, you know, whatever, 10% of your, 5% of your top velocity. And that would just be based on, I dunno, small hydrogen atoms you can pick up that are very sparsely spread around space, or something like that. But the idea would really be that there should be some resource management in terms of fuel. So there definitely will be on sort of the overdrive, whatever you want to call it, the "nitrous" that we currently use for boost, which I think is a good gameplay mechanic because you want to make sure that you manage that in your dogfight and don't blow through it all. But there may also sort of general, overall fuel tanks for jumps - you know, so you have to have a certain amount of fuel to run your jump engine, and if you don't you'd have to go and collect it or harvest it from a gas giant - and generally travelling at warp speeds and normal speeds. And then if you were out of all the fuel, I don't think we would have you run completely out of gas, but you would probably inch along or maybe you have to do a distress call or something like that.But that's kind of currently where our thoughts are on that, but we haven't refined anything really beyond the base concept of the boost fuel. I mean we can have multiple styles of fuel - that's the whole pipe system we have, because we can determine any kind of resource and have it go between any kind of pipe, and have tanks to hold it. So the system already supports all that, so it's just whether we want to bifurcate the boost fuel from the general engine fuel, and do you wanna have a wrap drive fuel versus a normal engine fuel? So we haven't fully decided that, but that's all stuff that we're working on, and will be part of like, what we think is fun and challenging when you're flying around, and what would give good resource management, and you know... you should have advantages, right? You have a big exploration ship, drop tanks, and then you should be able to go further, so it probably will factor in.