Can you talk at all about what is in store for the Salvage profession? Will it involve carving up ships for scrap (or resources in the repair profession), specifically seeking out functioning or expensive parts of derelict ships, or some combination of those? Will this be like mining and require good scanning to effectively find salvageable ships and stations?asked by End-yo

Yeah mentally I break salvage into two different concepts. One is what I call scavenging when you're actually extracting entire pieces of value from other ships, could be engines, could be weapons, could be cargo whatever. Then there's also what I'd call scrapping which is basically the extraction of the raw materials. You're actually pulling off the metal plating from the wings and stuff like that.

We've talked about having these elements distributed in a logic fashion so that the players that are more knowledgeable about where the most valuable elements and stuff are on a particular ship can strip the most valuable pieces that much more quickly. So what you're going to wind up having is a tier of players: some of interested in one thing or the other, some of them are interested in only the most valuable parts and then they quickly move on looking for other things to scrap. Other players are basically looking at completely reducing a ship down just a husk and leaving no value behind.

Yeah to be more specific to answer the question. It is going to be a combination of both so you'll be able to just take general sort of debris and essentially scrap it into whatever salvageable material that you will be able to use or resell. Then you can also look to salvage working individual items. So if a wing blows off, but maybe it has a functioning gun that hasn't been damage or damaged very much, if you can find that and detach that from the wing than you've got a second hand item you can sell.

Both those are going to be part of the salvage profession and Tony was talking about the next level which is scanning and knowing the aspects of a ship that may be the best to salvage. So you don't want to maybe salvage the entire hull, but perhaps this part of the hull has whatever titanium armour and therefore is more valuable than another part of the hull so that will be the part that you want to salvage or dissolve into your big salvage tank.,

And one of things I really like about that particular concept is that it scales really well to any number of players. In other words when you think about a salvage ship as having one laser or whatever it is that is basically going to pull the materials off of there, you've only got a single player that can actually engage in that and if you want more maybe we could add a second one of these devices, but you're still going to be fairly limited.

If you start to turn this into something to where players with their individual hand controlled stuff, it can basically extract things then you have two things: one it becomes very time consuming at that level, at a personal level to scrap an entire ship, but it's actually still very cost effective if you have done this enough as such that you know where all the most valuable areas are and that's all you're going to bother so. So what I would say is when you're talking about scrapping the entirety of a ship, that's probably going to be you're going to aim the fire house at it, the big dedicated device, but when you're talking about just extracting bits of value you quickly get in get out maybe because there's a lot of residual dangers in that area, then it actually becomes very effective to have you and four, six guys who's maybe other players, friends of y ours, other NPCs that you've hired to just attack it in mass, just hit the valuable parts and then go on.

Yup, absolutely. So there you go. All those things will be there so I think salvaging will be quite and graphically kind of already handle it with the damage shader because you can sort of dissolve off the surface in a more regular pattern and you're taking off the top of the hull for salvage.

This is a great example where we're reusing technology from one purpose to another and we're actually going to do the same thing, repair is actually going to be largely…

The other way.

the inverse of this process to where you take all the raw materials that you've stored in your ship and you can dispatch three, or four, or six guys or the big dedicated device depending upon how quickly you want to move across the entire ship and repair just select areas.

Yup, alright so the 7th most popular question comes from...