Where are we at with the implementation of sub-components for ship weapons and other items?
TL;DRShip weapon art assets already support swappable sub-components for post-3.0 weapons, but the system for swapping or upgrading parts doesn't exist yet and is scheduled in the backlog, with older weapons still to be redone.
The ship weapons, that's actually interesting because it's pretty much the other way around. So for the ship weapons, all the components, everything, the asset is ready, because we already knew that this was coming up. We want the player to be able to swap out specific parts of the weapon, only upgrade the barrel, only upgrade the cooling unit, the firing unit, and so on. So we made our art assets ready to support that. So that actually works for all weapons, I think, released after 3.0, except the legacy ones. But the system's not there. So you can't yet swap it out, and you can't upgrade specific parts yet, which then has an influence on the weapon. But again, that's also on our plate and scheduled in the backlog.
So Art anticipated it. Art has been working on it basically for 2018, since 3.0 came out. Now we just need to do the backlog of all those weapons that came before, and then our design and engineering and programming teams need to get to building the system that allows the actual switching out.