You take it to the point of realism and then you bring it back to the point of fun. How real is real when it comes to these spaceships? How obsessed or concerned are we with making sure everything is as scientifically or physically accurate as possible, and how much do we just rule-of-cool some stuff?

It depends on the ship, really. Depends who you ask as well. Ben's a very rule of cool person and you keep having to reel him in.

I've just got Jefferies tubes, that's what I want. Why aren't they all Jefferies tubes?

If you look at the Hornet, that's a really good example of thruster layout for what a real spaceship would be, in that it's got a big thruster at the back, it's got two retros that are in line with it, and then the maneuvering thrusters are all equally spaced around it. So it's very functional. It's a cube with spaceship dressing on it. So that's a real spaceship. But if you want every spaceship to be like that, that's sort of the perfect layout, which means every ship's thruster layout has to be like that, just on a scale. The Gladius, hopefully everyone knows what a Gladius looks like: those thrusters aren't in line like they are on the Hornet, they're spread out because of the shape of the wings. So technically that's less perfect, less real, but it looks, in my opinion, cooler than a Hornet. And it's like that on every ship. We always try and make sure, and I'm pretty sure we have in every instance, but I'm not going to 100% confirm that, that every ship has enough thrusters to believably do what it's supposed to do. And they may not be in the scientifically correct place. If you look at the 400i, there's thrusters there to move it, but they could be in a better place, but that would mean changing the toothbrush nose of it. Snout. And that's where the rule of cool compromise comes in. And that's different for every ship.

The decisions that were made in the design of the flight system are such that we tend to forgive imperfections with regard to the balance of things. So the thrusters, their positions do matter, as Mark has made clear. But if you, for example, have a slight imbalance between the front and the back of the ship, the system will ignore the imbalance. But you do kind of need to be sensible, because there is a point where you can do something kind of dumb and it won't fly.

It's very good at mirroring real life in that way anyway, because I think with our advances in technology as a race, we could probably come up with the perfect automobile, right? We could probably come up with the car that is the most efficient, but if you look at cars on the road, most of them are different. And I think there's always a point in real life where a decision has been made to be like, okay, we could do it like that, but this way just feels better. This way is nicer. As a collective, we prefer it like this. And our systems allow us to have that freedom as well, pretty much.

I want to also give a shout out to the realism with regard to the way ships animate and move. Like you mentioned earlier, the way doors move and animate, all of it is not faked. There's physical space for how everything moves, which is really cool.

Nothing disappears into... Well, what you were mentioning earlier, which is, you start white boxing and you're walking through the ship and it's like, oh yeah, you've done the doors and everything. And you're like, cool, just put it in the outside camera and open the doors. It's like, oh, okay, all right. We can hide stuff if we wanted to. We just don't draw it when it goes into the wall. But we want to make sure... we want to sell the dream.

Those are the sorts of details that you can notice a lot of the time, especially when you've got lots of things that are breaking the laws of physics in subtle ways. The more they build up, the more it breaks that sense of, this is a real place I could be.

And it was a real stumbling block in the past for a lot of our concept artists who worked on other projects, and they were used to, it's just a movie set, or it's just a TV set, so I don't care where that door goes once it's opened.

The inside has to fit in the outside? It seems like such an obvious thing, but it's not a consideration that exists anywhere else. Not just in other video games, but in any of sci-fi.

But it feels great when it does, though, because everything makes sense. As you're walking around the ship: why is it so thick? Oh, well, that's where the bulkhead door goes. Why is this wall thicker than this wall? Because that's an outside door. And it sells the realism of the ship more, which is so important, that it feels like it could be a thing.