What methods do we have to counter quantum enforcement?

This is tier zero and we've just implemented it, so the counterplay will be something that we develop as we get more feedback and have time to iterate on this. But for now, again, the Mantis is not the greatest ship to take on another ship head to head. So there's that. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to quantum travel outside of the normal lanes, so you can't choose to create your own path, but you can certainly choose to make a dogleg path to your destination to avoid possible QED volumes if you think there's going to be one on that path.

To go off of what Kirk was saying: vehicle features specifically has plans in the near future to upgrade ping to use more of those backend services to uncover more information further out. Right now, ping just finds stuff that's actually spawned. We want to adjust it to find interesting things that may not exist yet or could happen in an area. So we also want to ping much further and allow you to scan potentially much further distances. I'm not saying it will happen, but something we would probably explore is: you do a large ping, and you discover there's maybe an interdiction happening in that area. Maybe not give you the exact coordinates, but say that area has some kind of interdiction play, you should be wary.

Give you a clue as to where these things could be. And then there are other things we can explore. This is currently our only QED ship. Should we make more? We can certainly balance it so that maybe you need a capital-ship-sized QED device in order to pull other capital ships out. There might be some counterplay with that, like maybe you do have to have the same size ship to do that. Maybe the smaller ships can pass through these using some kind of quantum physics, tunneling. Or maybe we can team up multiple smaller QED ships at the same time to create a really powerful quantum enforcement bubble that can pull a capital ship out of quantum travel.

And we do warn players that they're about to be interdicted a few seconds beforehand. It would be cool if we had a mechanic where you could boost power to some system to potentially burst through it. There are a lot of options we've talked about exploring in the future.

And of course, we've also mentioned in the past that the size, quality and grade of components themselves will begin to play a factor. You may be able to outfit a ship that's more resistant to the effects of a quantum enforcement device. So as more and more of the component system comes online, there'll be a number of ways to work around this.

You guys know the app Waze? When you travel, there's a word-of-mouth thing where someone has been interdicted, and they can leave a mark and message everyone, so it's a known thing: oh, there's an interdictor down this way, so be careful to avoid it.

I think you're probably absolutely right about that, Chris. As more of the Stanton system and more of Star Citizen comes online and this becomes a bigger thing, you will see orgs that act as service organizations for this kind of thing, reporting that quantum enforcement has been reported in this sector, along this route. And there will be an entire new cottage industry created for players to provide services to other players.