Won't all this work have to be redone when armor and physicalized damage come online?

I mean, that's the beauty of Star Citizen. You balance for the tech that we have now, and you anticipate the tech we'll have in the future. It's the same issue that we have with a bunch of other systems. We can't build the damage and the balance for tech that's not ready for the live game. So while internally we're preparing for all that stuff and having a lot of discussions and testing a lot of philosophies, it will have to get changed once we get to that point. But we're already having discussions internally about what that means. So it's like when we had a more recent one, the shield tech, where it was using SDFs. We rolled that out for a few different ships, and the community actually found some loopholes and bugs with it. We kind of want to do that with physicalized damage, too, once we get to that point: we roll it out, see what impact that has, and then make balance changes when it gets there. But yes, it will definitely change the game. And I know Rich is looking forward to it.

It is definitely a big challenge to keep on top of a live product, but also think of what's coming in the future and how we get to where we're going to be in the future. But the two do kind of align because we're always thinking about it. Which does make it difficult sometimes explaining to players that we've done this for a reason and we've done this in anticipation, or we've done this because this is what we have in the game currently, but it will change. And it is difficult to keep on top of that, but it keeps me on my toes and it keeps the team on our toes. It's part of the enjoyment, really, because we're always moving the tech forward. So it's always going to change. And for me, that's a really great part of Star Citizen: the tech's always getting better.