Ship in ship spawning, what is the next step?

So last year we had a prototype of this running. And I can tell you, we had it working; it was a prototype. So what we did is in VMA, you picked, I think it was the Starfarer, and then we put a rover in the back. And you used VMA, and you picked the Starfarer, you picked the rover, and you hit the button. Then you had to run all the way over to ASOP and hit spawn. And when we did that, we ran across a bunch of technological challenges that we had to solve. And in fact, the stuff that we solved for those went into the landing system for ship-on-ship docking. So you are seeing the work that we did little by little as we, I guess I want to say, harden it and make it stronger, making sure it works. Getting a ship spawning in a ship, we could do it on the dev side. It's more of how we let the player do it. Going through VMA and then running to ASOP is not very user friendly, because it's two separate systems that you have to do in order to toggle it. There are some other technical challenges, which I'll get to after. We've had discussions with different teams about what we could do to potentially change the ASOP spawning, because it would be really nice if I could go up to that ASOP terminal, say, I want this Constellation, I want the rover here, hit spawn. It puts everything in one package. But before we could do that, we have to change other systems before we could get to that point. So the player front-facing side has to get addressed. And the other technical challenges we have to figure out is what happens if Sean parks his rover in my ship. I own the ship, so if it despawns, he can't get his ship back. Do we want to allow that? Have I stolen his ship? Should I get a CrimeStat for that? And I got despawned. There's those little type of technical hurdles that we have to figure out before we allow this. There's also cargo. In the back of the Starfarer, I think there's a cargo area where you could put some cargo spots. If we also want to put your ship there, we can't allow you to put the ship there if there's cargo there, because you could add cargo to stuff and then you want to add a ship or an object there. That won't work. So we now need to get the cargo system to understand that there's going to be a ship in there. Now, the good news is there is going to be a major revision to the cargo system. And we're going to utilize that API once it comes online to prevent these sort of things from happening. I think it even may be incorporated inside of it. So there have been some prototypes. We've hit some technical hurdles. Some we solved, some are still in our backlog, and some are going to get addressed in the near future.

And some are getting used now, like ship-on-ship docking. So to remind that, that's all physical inventory. It's another sort of scanning thing where both of the pillars are working together on this one. Physical inventory is a requirement for that to work correctly, which is another, it was a question that was on the forums anyways, about the cargo grid, what the future of the cargo grid is, and it's that there is no future for the cargo grid. There is the reality of being able to put down the actual objects that are within your ship, now in your ship in the cargo area, but it doesn't have to be tied to this cargo grid. And that is exactly what Mark is mentioning. You have this in there, but you also have a whole bunch of boxes placed around.