We've talked about repair since the beginning of the project. What makes now the time to actually buckle down, start putting things on paper and push the process forward?
TL;DRRepair has been needed for a long time and becomes more pressing as persistence and the incoming health system make caring for items matter, so this is a starting point to experiment with and expand toward salvage.
Well, to be honest, it's been a long time coming, and it's a system that's basically been needed. And the more persistence that we get inside the PU... Well, we've got the health system coming in, for starters, soon, which obviously makes caring about everything you've got and taking care of all of your items a lot more important, because it's all persistent. So if you do get into a few scrapes in the PU, you're not going to just abandon your ship and die on a planet somewhere. You're going to want to have an option to be able to repair it and fly out of there. So I think it all just ties into all the other systems that are coming into the game at the moment, and the fact that it's a system that's been looming for a long time, and this is the starting point for it. Obviously, it expands out when we start looking at ship salvage. There'll be similar systems there where you might be able to use hull-scraping lasers to take that stuff off, but then there's things like the Reclaimer with the claw, and you just kind of progress from what we're doing down here all the way up to that. So yeah, this is a really good starting point for us to just start noodling around with, playing with, seeing what works, what doesn't, and then go from there, basically.