Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Well, I guess with exploring, we've talked about short-range scanning, and we've had very high-level discussions about long-range scanning and what that means. I think I spoke a little bit about it on the Reverse the Verse that I was on two weeks ago: having different views, so whether it's thermal imaging or gamma or something along the EM spectrum. I think Tony would equate it to the old-school pictures where you would have to stand there for five minutes as the light goes in. It's kind of a similar idea, where you're picking out anomalies, and then from there you would go in and expand on that. But there's a lot of systems that we need to be thinking about, whether that just be background noise in the overall system, and then even thinking about how we're going to populate the system. And so when you're looking in that general direction, you're loading things in that might be interesting for the players to find.

Dan Trufin · Lead Systems Designer, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Also, to add on top of that a bit, you mentioned that we're still developing one solar system. That should not be a problem, because even in this one solar system, we want places that have not been discovered. We want players to find their own things and find things that others have not found, and maybe be able to sell that information and the location of rich resources or, I don't know, a drug lab that will offer you various goodies. And all these things, maybe discover a weapons dealer in the middle of nowhere that's selling something that we haven't seen before. And that information alone will be power. So we want people who explore to be the first guys that discover these things, and what they do with it, whether they share it with their organization or they sell it to other people, is up to them. And ideally, once it gets discovered by enough people, then it becomes public knowledge and everyone can access it. But by that point, the money was made from that lucrative business.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

And also, from my standpoint, just building the overall system and thinking about how huge this thing is right now. I mean, from tip to tip right now, I think we're talking about roughly 41 minutes in quantum. And if that took up your whole 1080 screen, then the tip of the mouse might be nine hours of just straight flight. And so when I was working with Pete on overall solar system layout, and when we're talking about resources or where possible aggressive paths would be, how do we make sure that it's interesting when you're flying to these different things? Not only just probability volumes, but also, I think people are kind of seeing it right now with interdiction. It happens a lot right now from my standpoint, but it's one of those things where I would like to have a threshold where, okay, you haven't done... We'll bring this up in front of you or around you, so you get a blip on your radar or something like that, instead of actually pulling you completely out of quantum, and you can go and investigate it or continue on your way.