Will we ever create a tool to view the health of ship components, to basically scan your own ship and come up with an overall health number for it?
TL;DRThey don't want a tool giving an overall ship health number because it would encourage number-adding meta thinking and misrepresent a ship's real durability, and they currently lack such a tool internally.
Well, a tool like that would actually emphasize the thing we want to avoid, which is building a meta gameplay. We do not want players to say, OK, if I add this part and this part and this part and this part, I have 20,000 HP together. But those 20,000 HP give you no idea what the actual effective HP of a ship is. So even if we had this tool, we wouldn't want it to be an effective thing in your decision making. I mean, if you buy a car, maybe you look at how fast it can go, but you're not really interested in the exact number. You're interested in how it handles, if it's safe, how many airbags it has. But you do not care about, hey, it has a top speed of 260.5 kilometers per hour. You do not care about, hey, the frame will dissolve itself when you crash it with that much velocity into a wall or something. It's always about the experience. And I would like to avoid that kind of thinking that you just add up numbers. Star Citizen is not an RPG where you do that. It's supposed to be a believable gameplay simulation slash experience. And as such, I would like to de-emphasize the pure number thinking and go more to the experiential view of things. That said, we actually do not have a tool ourselves to display all the data. Sometimes it would actually be useful, but at the moment, sometimes we actually have to draw the data out of XML tools.
There's also, on top of us wanting it to be experiential, a lot of subtlety to the combat system that makes giving numbers actually quite hard. A really good example that we have had is that a certain fighter could have, I don't know, let's say 50,000 hull HP points. But it has, say, a wing or some other part that's extending out and it has thrusters on the end of it. You could, for example, break that part off without dealing all of the HP damage and have effectively nullified the effectiveness of that ship. Which makes the actual HP, for example, not actually that representative of what fighting that ship is truly like. And that subtlety is not captured in straight numbers.