Guillermo · EU PU gameplay/feature team

So that's a good question, and it comes first with, okay, what is soft death? So soft death is a bit of an interim solution due to the fact that we cannot currently in the game let you damage the power plants or relays or anything like that. So that means that, the way the game works currently, if you set something to zero HP, it will just explode. Soft death allows us to bypass that a bit so that you get a non-functional ship that you can still loot. With the physical damage system, we expect that to change, and instead of having soft death as its own thing, have it be more along the lines of, if you lose enough parts of your ship, well, you will stop flying or you will stop being able to fight. And whether that's repairable, well, it will depend. In some cases, some components are easy to change and repair. On the other hand, power plants for some ships are so large that you will need to tow the ship all the way back to port to do any kind of repair.

Thorsten Leimann · EU PU gameplay/feature team

Yeah, so to add to that, the soft death that we currently have is basically just an interim solution to the proper soft death that will then come with what Guillermo just described. Even moving forward with Maelstrom, it will be even more complex, where players will be able to shoot away certain sections of the ship. So you don't just have to repair the ship items on it, but you have to exchange entire segments of the ship itself.