Are we still going to be able to bring up ground vehicles in the freight elevator at some point?asked by codename Sol

Oh yeah, absolutely. What I want to do before we bring ground vehicles up from the freight elevator is I want to decouple from ATC. I shouldn't need permission from the air traffic controller to bring my ground vehicle up. I'm in my hangar. I'm in my own little safe space. I can do what I want.

I mean, it's air traffic control. What do they care about?

They should care about what happens when I leave the hangar, not what I do in the hangar. So I definitely want to do that. And then the other part is the insurance handling flow. Ground vehicles are vehicles, and vehicles have a slightly different insurance flow than other items. So that means we need to make sure that that insurance flow is available to the freight elevator, for freight to be able to do the same thing. I wouldn't want to go to the ASOP terminal to deal with insurance on my vehicle, to then go to a different terminal to bring it back up. So those are the two technical hurdles for me that I would like to see solved; I think that will make it a more robust feature.

Yeah, this ties very directly to our first question. Ground vehicles coming up from freight elevators, I think that's appeared in our internal roadmap, but we're not going to do that until we feel comfortable that we have really, is "robustified" a word? It is now. Robustified freight elevators. We don't want to build a feature on top of something that has reliability issues. And we don't want to exacerbate that by looping it into more gameplay loops. So we want to instead invest the time fixing up freight elevators like we just described before, and then layer on top.

I think also the point about decoupling from ATC is an important point. The air traffic controller in the game has evolved into also the manager of your insurance claims or the destroyed state of ships or things like that. And we don't want to keep that logic in this area. We want to be able to use that elsewhere properly. And so we just don't want to build on top of the current ATC to support the freight elevator with ground vehicles. We really want to decouple that. So Jens, you mentioned something just earlier about how insurance is different for ground vehicles. What did you mean by that, really?

It's just purely a technical aspect. So it's not that vehicles have a special type of insurance. It's for us on the engineering side: the flow itself is different and we just need to move it out so it becomes available for the freight elevator kiosk.

And other kiosks.

Yeah, exactly.