Regarding fire plus salvage effects, a bit more gameplay-related, but have you heard of or had any work on potential hazards whilst salvaging, i.e. accidentally lasering a fuel line or causing a fire or explosion, anything like that?
TL;DRSalvage hazards like hitting a fuel line are a design decision that he can't confirm, but he says it's under discussion and VFX could spawn effects from such situations, though marking up hull pipes would be tricky.
So this is ultimately a design decision, so I'm just going to speculate. And this is really just me thinking about this from a point of view of: if that was a requirement, how would we deal with it from the VFX point of view? I know it's been discussed. I know I've heard people talking about this in various conversations we've had not too long ago. It's how do you mark it up, I think, is the thing there. It's how complex does it need to be? I know that there's certain ships with the damage shader where, once you've stripped away the top layer of the hull... and you can do that just when you shoot the ships with the damage shader as it is, but that's similar to what salvaging might be... there are lots of pipes just in the art itself, so in the shader. That would be quite tricky to mark up, I think, from a point of view of having that pipe have gameplay implications. Personally, I think that it would make sense to go that detailed with it. But I think with the risk-versus-reward element of salvage gameplay, there's probably going to be things like that. Again, I can't clarify too much because it's a design question, but I know that that's in the mix. I know that's in the discussion. And if that needs to be done, there's ways that we can have our effects spawn from those situations.