How do we get a multi-crewed ship to have a reasonably fun experience together, like with mining?

Oh, well, mining is, there are actually a number of different... There are occupations that will benefit tremendously from having multiple players and/or NPCs working in tandem together. So to use mining as an example, mining is not an occupation that's completely safe. These big asteroids that you're going to be injecting megawatts of energy into, they contain volatile materials. They contain compressed gases. There are a number of ways by which you can wind up blowing these things apart as opposed to just extracting the valuable materials that you actually want to get. And so the first thing when you actually go into an asteroid field that you'd wind up doing is you'd have a dedicated scanning operator. And his entire purpose is to basically help you figure out, in this vast field of thousands of asteroids, which ones have a component constitution that's attractive given what you're actually after, given what the prices in that system warrant you spending your time trying to extract. So you've got a scanning operator. You've obviously got the beam operators, which are going to be the guys in the ship that are actually directing these mining lasers that are injecting these beams of energy into these asteroids in order to extract fragments that a cargo loading operator would then seek to maneuver within the ship. And the way by which this works for the cargo operator is he's basically got repulsor and attractor beams. Attractor as opposed to tractor. They're actually a little bit different in regards to how we use them within the game. So the repulsor beam obviously just pushes something away and a tractor beam just pulls it towards you. And so if you kind of picture looking out through your cargo hold towards an asteroid, which would be the point of view of your cargo loading operator, he would see each of these fragments as they're being blasted off. And all that he's essentially doing is, based upon the constitution of each little fragment, he's applying a little force to basically try to maneuver it into your cargo hold or to push it away. The beam operators actually have quite a bit of work to do in regards to monitoring what's going on so that the situation doesn't get too out of control. We've got an exothermic reaction detector that monitors the amount of energy that's being produced. And what that's essentially doing is it's giving you a visual indication of whether or not the amount of energy that you'd expect to see based upon the beam that you're injecting into the asteroid is larger than what you'd expect. And what that would signal is that you're actually starting to generate chain reactions with some of these materials. And that becomes very dangerous, because if you've got something that's sufficiently volatile and has a sufficient explosive force and you actually ignite a chunk of it, again, you can blow this asteroid apart. And so you're constantly monitoring how much excess energy is being produced. You're also monitoring seismic activity. Seismic activity is very important in regards to mining these asteroids because some of these materials, kind of like nitroglycerin, they're not necessarily sensitive to the injection of energy so much as vibration. And so there can be materials on the complete opposite side of an asteroid. And if you're basically shaking, if you're breaking fragments of sufficient size, you're causing little micro-tremors to emanate back and forth through these asteroids. And so the point is that the mining beam operators are monitoring the beams that are being injected to ensure that you're not going to blow the thing apart. The pilot is constantly rotating around the asteroid to find optimal locations. The scanning beam operator is basically identifying which asteroids are most attractive. The attractor/repulsor, the cargo loading operator, he's basically maneuvering this stuff into your ship. You've got a refinery operator that's basically in charge of the mechanics that allow unrefined ore to be converted into pure materials that you can actually sell back at the major space stations and landing zones. And so this is just a small example of, you could do each one of these jobs yourself, but it would be extraordinarily slow compared to basically having a well-trained group of five players.

I mean, the idea is if you're doing it with a group... And if you're doing it by yourself, it'll just take you longer because you'll kind of have to do all these aspects yourself and that will just take some time. So you can do it single player, but multiplayer, working together as a team, you'll make more money probably.

Yeah, and this is something that's true for a lot of the occupations, where you can do it all yourself. You can run from station to station. It will be inefficient. At times it will become incredibly dangerous to do that. ... And your exothermic reaction detector spikes, and it shows you, look, the amount of energy that's being produced is growing exponentially, even though you've completely shut your beam off, then what that's doing is signaling you had better get out of there very quickly. And if it takes you 30 seconds to basically switch over into the pilot seat, then you've got a real problem. And so realistically, for a lot of these types of group-oriented activities, you don't necessarily have to have all of these roles filled by players. There are NPC crew members that you'll be able to hire. And of course, the quality varies depending upon what you're willing to pay them on a monthly basis. So if you get a guy really, really cheaply, then he may make mistakes. If you get a guy that's extraordinarily skilled and you're willing to pay those higher wages, then he's going to wind up doing a much better job of guiding the really valuable fragments that are ejected from the asteroid into your cargo hold. The guy that's operating the refinery is going to do a much better job of actually running a large amount of ore through your refinery in the most energy and therefore economically efficient manner possible than a less skilled player or NPC would be able to do.

Another occupation that kind of meets this criteria would be a pioneer. There are a number of these occupations... Basically, a pioneer's purpose is to discover new objects of interest. And this actually factors in with what Chris was saying earlier in regards to, a pioneer would probably be the closest thing we have to, you just want to see what's out there. I don't really care to exploit it. I don't care to fight. I just want to find things. But it's interesting because it's not a one-off. It's not a disposable mission where he just kind of lives off on his own. A lot of the game design is turning out to be very symbiotic in nature. And what I mean by that is a pioneer's sole purpose is finding things of interest. That might be an asteroid field. Why is that valuable? Well, because after he discovers it and it becomes common knowledge, then the people that actually want to do mining missions utilize that output of a pioneer as an input for them. They need a location. They need an asteroid field at which they can ply their trade. A pioneer might discover a comet that would be extraordinarily useful as something for a scientist to research. One of the examples I use is the movie Armageddon, and you have the space shuttles approaching from the backside of the asteroid that was approaching Earth and you had large fragments breaking off. And so you can picture a science mission basically needing to get a 30-second video of the backside of one of these asteroids that's throwing off all these pieces. And so the danger there is you need to be an extraordinarily good pilot. Another thing for a pioneer would also be identifying derelict ships, which would be of a lot of interest to salvagers and to people that are willing to put in the time to try to repair these things, get them back to port, and if you can actually do that, you may get a large payday. So there's a lot of attention being given to these different occupations within the game where, while there may be a lot of danger, whether that's mining or whether that's a scientist that's trying to get a 30-second video from a dangerous spot on a given asteroid, a scientist that's trying to get a sample of a coronal mass ejection, but in such proximity that it's actually very dangerous, or trying to get precise measurements on a micro black hole, all these things have their own dangers associated with them, but they're not of the combat variety. And so the real point there is there will be a lot of danger both on the combat-oriented missions and on the non-combat, and it's up to the players to basically choose what they're most interested in doing.