Are we closer to making the Hull-C reality?
TL;DRThe Hull-C is closer because the needed multiple physics grids now exist, but several dependencies remain, including scalable rooms, separate state-machine triggers and a cargo system that doesn't rely on 1 SCU boxes.
We are. Like you say, the ship-to-station docking required animatable and multiple physics grids, which is what the Hull-C requires. So we now have those. So that's one thing ticked off the list of Hull-C dependencies. We still have a few more that we need to solve before we can release the ship, but we are able to actually progress internally now a bit more with it. So we need the ability for rooms to scale, like physics areas, because now you can have gravity in that central spine, but there'll be no air. So it's sort of equally as problematic for release. And that will also help all the level designers and the vehicle designers, because we want to unify the way all the rooms and shapes are made in the engine. At the moment, they're all sort of individual shapes. So a designer has to go in and mark up a room for the air. An audio designer has to go in and mark up a room for the audio volume. Art have to go in and mark up a room for VisAreas and portals to stop light coming in. So we want to put them all into one single feature that can support scaling. And then bam, that's the Hull-C part solved. The two other bits needed are a way to nicely trigger state machines on vehicles. So we sort of fudge it together at the moment by tying state changes into the landing gear deployments. We need to split that out. That's scheduled for one of the vehicle teams. And then the last one is really the cargo system. It obviously carries thousands of units of cargo, and we only supply cargo in 1 SCU boxes at the moment, and that system needs to support not doing that. It needs to go, "Right, you've bought 4,000 units of Laranite and here's 100 big boxes of it," because [otherwise] it will just cripple server performance. We've seen what happens when people go wild with Picos. This would be a whole lot worse than that.
And it's one of those things where the upcoming cargo decks in 3.11 (well, not the functionality that's in 3.11, but the cargo decks themselves) are a platform for additional features, and those will tie into being able to offload things like the Hull-C and maybe even load them up to begin with.
Yeah, they're the perfectly designed places for that, because you don't want to take your Hull-C... well, you can't land with the cargo out, so there's very little point taking it down to the surface to land, but you will need to drop these off at orbital stations.