At the 2018 pace of development the ship pipeline appears to have a backlog of about seven years. Is there a plan to increase the pace of delivery or should we expect current concepts to be released in 2025?

I'd be interested to find out how they worked that time scale out, because from the last time I looked at the schedule it is a significantly shorter time frame than that. It's not seven years' worth of stuff, even factoring in all the known future ships. It's nowhere near that. This year gives the idea that it's sort of slowed down. It's because we've had a lot of big ships going on in the background. There's only so many people, and when you put a lot of them on one big ship, there is a big lull in releases. So I think this year is probably one of the most productive years, certainly for a while. We're making a good effort to try and tackle those long-standing ships that have been kicking around that haven't had the love. They're moved up. Everything has priorities. The priorities change depending on the needs of the project at the time. So we had a big push this year for getting stuff for Squadron needs, which is why a lot of things like the Hammerhead fill up the schedule. And every ship is different in its scheduling. So whilst we do have blocks of X months for this size ship, X months for this size ship, within that, those can grow or shrink depending on: can it reuse a lot of assets from another ship, like the Hammerhead? So the Hammerhead, if it was a brand new ship, it would be this long, but because it's reusing a lot of the Idris stuff with material changes, it goes... if you put an extra artist on it, it goes... So you can't use the same thing across the board for them all.

The exponential growth is a thing that applies to all video game development, and it's the hardest thing to quantify and to demonstrate in those early days: every ship you build makes the next ship just that much faster and faster. So the progress compounds and your ability to turn these things around faster increases over time. Not just as our artists learn more and more about how to build these one-to-one spaceships to the scale and level of fidelity that we need here, but as our pool of shareable, reusable resources improves and we can start, for lack of a better term, kit-bashing these ships together. So while we're not going to sit here and put in a specific year or a date, guys, come on, who are you talking to? I'm not going to sit there and say, oh, the ships will be done by this point. And of course, we are still continuing to add new ships to the pipeline through our concept promotions. I think we're going to do a little bit better than 2025. We'll leave it at that.

Just a little bit.