For Pat and Matt S.: can you walk us through a critical chain reaction ship destruction? What is the goal for how that would work, mechanically and visually?

The full systemic damage system. So I kind of put a list together at the beginning of the year of what we wanted to achieve for damage and talked to design about this. So first off, we want the dogfighting experience to be really good, where you have indication of where you're getting hit from and effects going off in the interior. And you kind of get the warning that you're about to go critical, and you have some time to get out of your seat and start to repair things. We're going to add radial damage to missiles. And the difficulty there is there is a zone inside the ship and a zone in space. And the radial damage has to affect interior components in order to hurt them. So once that is established, we will add damage to the interior components, their own radiuses which they influence also if they explode, and they can also send feedback on the pipes, and pipes will expend heat, and then your overall ship performance will decrease based on these factors, and if enough critical systems explode, you'll achieve a ship destruction. But we do want to allow for the possibility you can break a ship in half without blowing it up. So if you start to shoot the hull and you're not hitting any critical system, you could probably snap it in half.

And also a lot of that is going to play into where the different components live inside of a ship. I know the Vanguard was very much built initially on its almost redundant setup, where it would have a power plant and a cooler inside each of its main housings on separate sides of the ship. So yeah, you've shorn off one half of the ship, but it still has all those functional components where it can keep flying even if the other half went critical. Whereas something that, say, has two power plants but they're right next to each other, and then one of those power plants takes critical damage, it detonates, it does this explosion radius; well, it's right next to the second power plant, so even though that power plant may not have taken any damage, if the first power plant criticals hard enough, that one's going to go along with it. To try and create some of these more systemically occurring events for this kind of critical damage, but also make sure it's not something where how you critically damage and blow up one ship is how you critically damage and blow up every single ship. So it's, oh, I've got this one gameplay routine down set. So I've got that down set for the Hornet or for the Constellation, but I'm still learning for all these other ships that give me trouble.

We've also spoken about, as your ship takes damage, the captain would assign tasks to repair certain aspects of the ship, adding gameplay for the passengers. So we're very concerned about occupying the passengers with things to do. So we talked about fighting fires and repairing and adding fuses to components, where you would have this kind of almost mini-game where you're repairing the component itself.

I imagine that would extend the time to kill on these larger ships quite a bit.

Yeah, and that's definitely one of the goals, especially once we get some of the Shield 2.0, Item 2.0 in. There's a lot that will be going on with that, where even just your basic shield operator guy is going to have a lot to do in terms of just doubling or tripling the longevity of your ship by them being dedicated to that role. But then, like Matt was saying, if one of those components gets fried and you've still got someone else on the ship, they may be the one running back. Shield generator 2 is broken, find that panel, open that up, there's the broken fuse, grab the replacement, get that stuffed in, power cycle that shield generator and pray it's not going to take too long before you've taken even more damage.

And then beyond that, if you think about a ship as a derelict that you might find in space, it's going to be pre-damaged, you're going to come across it, you might harvest it for components, you might strip the metals to store the alloy to create other things, or you might be able to repair that ship and fly it out of there. So we're looking at all these, from dogfighting to destruction to post-destruction and being derelict, this whole lifespan of a ship.