Are there any plans on cargo loading of the bigger ships such as the Hull series of ships and is the loading at a space station or even planetary going to be automatic or will we have a specialized small cargo loading ships similar to the Argo to load manually if we choose to?asked by Steve Apollyon

Yeah, so we have talked about the fact that we don't want the larger ships to just park it, click the button and it's done. That these larger ships that have vast quantities of materials would actually take a significant period of time to unload. And they result in missions for NPCs and/or other players to undertake.

We've got a pretty comprehensive design right now but we're still iterating through that because we want to unify some of the functionality for loading and unloading so that it's the same basic concept on the smaller ships as on the larger ships. And right now what we've got in the design stage is something that works, I think, remarkably well on the smaller stage it just doesn't scale so well when you start talking about several orders of magnitude more materials and how you don't bottleneck in terms of getting potentially dozens or hundreds of other smaller ships to extract those resources.

So we're still refining exactly how that's going to work but that's the general direction. So there is going to be commonality in terms of you'll have the ability to work at a very localised scale and then you'll be able to scale that very wide so that there's content for a large number of players and/or NPCs on these bigger ships.

So, yeah, but are you answering whether it's automatic or not?

So like the way I was viewing it is that - and I think that we maybe have this as a later question in the series - when you go ... like on a big space station … like if I have a big container ship and a pull into the port of LA here a Long Beach there's a whole set up: there's longshoremen, big cranes and there's services. And the crew of the container ship don't actually unload the containers themselves - there's equipment that does it and there's people that are paid to do that. And I would say that in general in the bigger space ports you would have that same kind of setup where you would have the ability to unload the bigger ships, unload the containers. Potentially we've talked about having the ability for players to play the part of a longshoreman …

Right.

CR … they're running around in a little Argo and taking off a container from a Hull E and dropping it to another place and doing that. Or having AI do that. And then there obviously will be cases where - which is probably a later question we have here - there'll be manual loading and unloading of cargo where you don't have the big services. Like if I just had a ship and I was off the coast somewhere and there wasn't a port then obviously …

Right.

… I would have to be doing that myself. And so I think we've been looking at way that you have the automatic option that the services provide for you …

The automatic option when appropriate but the fidelity so that on these smaller ships you can actually … and this makes for much more interesting gameplay a of times in a lot of different cases because you can imagine scenarios to where you need to deliver a smaller quantity - a half dozen, a dozen - specific crates of some sort of illegal liquor or something to somebody in a planet, and part of the mission is not just finding where to procure this stuff and then get through customs without being detected, but once you are actually on the planet now you've got to take these crates physically to that guy before he's going to give payment. And so all of a sudden you start to get into a much more localised problem where you're trying to avoid security guards or else you're going at night because you may be …

I think we have that … I think we have a question that basically asks the same thing a little later on but …

You threw everything off because you reversed everything ...

… well … yeah … I kind of … I went from the big and the services to break it down to the other one.

Okay so I think … so the answer is there'll be services but we'll also have some specialised ships and equipment for unloading cargo. Especially in the case of the big Hull series.