We are talking refuel and repair this episode. My understanding is that you and your team are in the early days of actually finalizing the design for refueling that we'll be pursuing for the Persistent Universe. Where are we at, and what is the current implementation?

So yeah, you're right. We're in the early stages of this. We have a general high-level idea. And at this point, one of our senior designers is hard at work on pretty much ironing out every little detail that's going to come into play for refueling: from how does the UI look, how does the flow of the UI, where is the UI positioned in the ship, how exactly does the Starfarer boom arm function for refueling, stuff like this. So I'll try to take you through a bit how this works. Players will be able to go to a station and, using the refuel, rearm, restock UI, which will need to get redone for this because it was very simplistic and only doing little things, they'll be able to fill up their Starfarer with either hydrogen fuel or quantum fuel. They'll be able to also equip their Starfarer with various tanks that are purposely made for quantum fuel or hydrogen fuel. And then they'll have a UI to select how much they want in tank five, how much they want in tank three, which type of fuel, stuff like this. Once that part gets done, they'll pretty much have to fly and find a guy that has run out of fuel, didn't check his fuel meter and made a bit of a mistake. We're foreseeing this will be much more of a problem once Pyro kicks in, because refueling opportunities there at the station are really minimal. So this will come into play a lot more. So for a tier zero, we're kind of looking right now at the players using chat, global chat, and going like, "Dude, I ran out of fuel. Is anyone with a Starfarer here that can help me?" Or, "Hey, I have a lot of fuel. Anyone need it?" And you guys meet, you form a group, you meet the old-fashioned way. In the future, we're thinking of using the beacon system to actually create the beacon. We could do this at the beginning, but it will just take us longer to release, and it could be a separate part that comes in later. So we thought we'd rather get refueling out to the players as fast as possible. And then we're going to do the part where you actually have a way to contract fuel being brought to you, or "I'm selling, I need buyers," basically. So once you reach that person, we're going to leverage the existing docking stuff that's coming online now. You'll be using the same UI to dock basically your Starfarer's boom refuel arm with the ship that's out of fuel. The ship that's out of fuel obviously has a fuel intake port that you'll have to pretty much, pin the tail on the donkey type of thing. It's a very precise maneuvering thing. If you mess it up, you either break your boom arm or you break the guy's ship. So there'll be a lot of challenge in doing that docking. Basically, you're flying tons and tons of metal and fuel into trying to very precisely insert that nozzle in there. Once you manage to do this and the ships are pretty much connected, similar to how the docking operation works, you will have a fuel transfer UI where you'll be able to set a price, which type of fuel, which type of tank do you want to transfer from. The receiving guy will be able to say, "Well, I only want half a tank because I'm low on cash," or something like this. There's pretty much a trade interface where you have a bit of management of what you want, how much do you want, and from the Starfarer side, where do you want to deliver from? Because you might have a tank that's completely full, a tank that's completely empty. We're looking into gameplay here of how the pressure in those tanks actually speeds up the delivery of fuel, so we want to insert a bit of gameplay here where, if you know what you're doing, you're going to be doing this fast, and it might be in a few seconds, like a pit stop Formula One thing. And if you're just an average player who first has a Starfarer and doesn't want to be bothered, you will still do it in about 30 seconds or one minute, depending what you're refueling. It might be a few minutes if you're refueling, I don't know, an Idris; that might take a few Starfarers. But you'll still be able to do it, you'll just do it slower. At this point, both of you guys are sitting in space, so if someone finds you, you're in a lot of trouble if they're a pirate. So we always want to do this risk-reward thing in our gameplay. We just don't want to get you guys to go there, you push a button and then you wait for everything to refuel. That being said, refueling will take time. Refueling at the station is going to take a lot longer than it does right now. Refueling between two ships is going to take time. It's not just going to be you push the button and you fly out. No, it just takes time. So that's the big picture of how this works. And hopefully we'll get to release it soon. It's still early, but we're getting there.

But it is still early, and I want to clear that statement up. We have been talking about refuel and repair and many of these systems throughout Star Citizen's development for several years now. When we say it's early days, that means active development on this feature has now begun.

The scheduling is done for it. We are just ironing out the details in the design. We already talked with a lot of the dependency teams, all the guys that need to provide the art, change the boom arm for refueling, how do we do the fuel ports. Gears are in motion for this. This pretty much needs to come with Pyro, because if it doesn't, then a lot of people are going to get stranded in Pyro and there's going to be no solution for them. So yeah, it needs to get there.