With all the damage components, as a ship gets damaged, as it loses thrusters or coolants or whatever, could that [sound simulation] system be damaged and the pilot find themselves in an environment-agnostic silence where none of this stuff comes through?

Yeah, that's a big one for us. So we're in the process of trying to fully flesh out an in-lore sound simulator component module. And we're trying to work out how that fits in with gameplay, because we don't want to give everyone super hearing all the time based on this new tech. But the basic principle is you've got a sound simulator component on your ship. And that will basically, in space where there's no atmosphere, where sound cannot transmit, propagate sound to you as if you were in atmosphere. So how would you hear it, although you can't. And then when you get out of your ship, you may have a light version of that component on your suit. So again, you can hear in space, but only to a certain distance. And then when you get down to atmosphere on a planet, it can also operate, but it might be more beneficial to take your helmet off and just hear the natural sounds as they propagate. But a big thing is system degradation. So if you can target a component and you can target someone's sound simulator and destroy it, they'll be flying around. You've got all these sensors, you've got the visual, you've got the audio going on, you know where everything is positionally, especially if you're playing in 5.1 surround, so you know if someone's behind you or not. And then if that system just cuts out, even just momentarily, you kind of lose your bearings on where everything is. And if it dies completely, then you get to the whole husk just flying through space. All you hear is the sounds of your ship creaking, all that kind of stuff, and then just the impact sounds. And then you feel vulnerable. That would be ace.

That split-second moment where it would cut out has the potential to be so cinematic and jarring of a moment, when you suddenly lose all of your senses basically for two or three seconds. That could be such a cool thing to have.

The stereotypical thing, you see it in films all the time, where people have radio comms back and forth and they get too far away and it all drops out. But imagine that for your entire audio experience. That would be awesome. And it also means that you have to maintain it. So just through negligence, you could not maintain your ship, and then everything starts sounding not as it should and dropping out.

So I have to do my duty here and say that that's not us guaranteeing that that's a system that will go into the game. We're actively working now. It's something that we want to investigate and pursue.