There's a number of questions in the chat about why the command module is such a critical weak point of the ship. What do we say to that?

I've seen a lot of discourse about it being artificially weak, which I think is not intended. It should be passing damage through to the main ship rather than killing everything. But there is some intent design-wise. The number one question everyone always has about the Ironclad is, why can't I fly it from the main bit? And that's never been the idea with this ship. You have this main block of a ship, same with the Caterpillar, and the command module gives you that functionality to fly around. That's the sort of USP of these sort of ships.

It's not the same as every other ship. There's always this assumption that you're trying to make every single ship be the ultimate ship, and it's not. The ships are supposed to have certain trade-offs. You get this, but you lose this. If you don't like it, that's fine. There are 200-some-odd other ships out there. The command module is interesting because it is, for all intents and purposes, a standalone craft. It can do everything a standalone ship can do. It can go to quantum. There was some confusion internally earlier, people kept referring to it as a parasite ship, and I'm like, no, if anything, the main hull is the parasite, because it needs the command module to survive, not the other way around. So as far as it being a critical weak point, that's something with the damage not being passed in?

Yeah, simply, it's a bug. The intention with the feature itself is for the command module to not be a critical part, clearly for gameplay purposes, because you don't want a very big, durable ship like the Ironclad should be to get shot down by whoever with the command module being destroyed in very, very few shots, because clearly the size difference is enormous. So the damage is going to be passed onto the Ironclad specifically, or the Caterpillar, depending on which one you are attached to. And all the damage to the components themselves would be passed to the Ironclad as well. So everything inside the command module would be in a dormant state, so to say. So basically the damage is going to be passed onto the main body.

Does that allow you to, when it does detach, have a suitable...

Yeah, exactly, a suitable raft that you can immediately go away and flee from it. The cool stuff is that you can also trigger the self-destruct and then leave the ship and fly out with the command module. So have fun with that.

So the short answer is that damage is supposed to be passed on to the main hull and it's just not at the moment. So it'll be addressed.

Yeah, as soon as possible. I think we already have a fix in for the hotfix, but as always, tentative fixes.

There should be a new series of fixes going out on Tuesday of next week that address a couple other things with the item recovery stuff. So if we can, we'll loop that in there. So that should be better for people before DefenseCon [ends].

It is clearly the intended gameplay dynamic that we want to reach, because clearly we don't want you to lose the ship, especially with the item recovery patch as well.