Please can you shed some light on the ship building process, and maybe help us understand why the ships that are seemingly complete, or very close to, cannot be placed in our hangars?asked by Rade

Well, we do shed a fair amount of light on the ship building process, especially in Jump Point, which I'm assuming that you would read because you're a subscriber asking a question. But, I mean, to be less flippant about it, there's a huge amount of work that goes into building the ships, so to actually give you a good example, like if everyone has watched The Next Great Starship, and you saw how the gunship that won, that was essentially about a 5-month process from design to building it. And even that ship, that may have looked great in the final of The Next Great Starship, requires a couple more months of work to actually get it in the hangar, and then it would be more work beyond that to get it into spaceflight.Because beyond just building the ship in 3D and modelling and texturing it, and getting it basically into the engine - it has to be setup in a certain technical way for the engine, so the hierarchy of the sub-objects of the ship... animations have to be hooked up - they have to be hooked up to your default character's animations so when you go in you sit into the seats, you go through doorways, and do all that. So there's a huge amount of technical setup that comes with that. I would say that our ships take, probably from concept to final, the quickest we could probably do is something like 3 months, and some will take 6 months or longer - the bigger ships definitely. We still haven't finished the Idris corvette - we've been working on that for quite a while. That one is taking maybe a bit longer than it would normally take because we're using it as our first cap ship prototype, and so we've been going through several rounds of R&D, and quite how we're going to organize, how we're going to lay out the interiors. As you notice as part of the updates on, say the Idris corvette, once we've gone into laying out the interior, and moving it around, and figuring out how all of it will function for what we need on Squadron 42, we determined that we needed more room and space, and the ship itself grew. So there's a fair amount of iterative development that goes on the ships once you get it in. It's sort of like, "oh, well this bit doesn't work. We have to change that," but it's by far the most complex thing that we build in all of the game. You can see it in the level of complexity and detail, animations, that you get into the ships.So that's sort of a high-level answer of why it takes so long, but believe me we're not holding back from putting them in the hangars if we can. We're trying to get them there as quickly as possible. There' just sooo many different items, and I would think that probably, maybe in a future "Inside CIG" or a Jump Point, we'll go into detail. We'll actually show you our multi steps of how ships are built from the concept, to the modelling, and all the rest of it. Because there's a lot more steps than was even shown on The Next Great Starship, and you'll see the love and passion that comes into them. So I know they're taking a while, but they'll worth it when they get there!