Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems Designer

Sure, I can take this one. So basically, this is what we're calling hull stripping, which is the first tier of implementation of salvage. So yeah, hand salvage. But what is hull stripping? Hull stripping is essentially you are using either the multi-tool or a dedicated tool, you get to a ship or a derelict or anything in that vein, and you're basically using the tool to strip away material that you're then taking on board and storing in a canister. For the very first implementation it will be a very generic material that is just munching everything off the ship that you're stripping away, and it's condensing it down and putting it in there, either for selling, to obviously make some money as a profession, or you can use it for repair as well, which is another part of the feature that we've not really talked about too much. And it's essentially the reverse of what salvage is. So if you think of salvage, I'm going up to a ship hull, I'm firing my weapon. And if you've ever seen those really satisfying videos of the laser rust strippers, that's kind of the look we're going for. You're basically burning away and taking on the metals of the ship hull, and you kind of see the skeleton underneath using the damage map system that we've got. And you're pulling that away into a generic material that you could then use for repairing as well. So what will that look like? When you strip away, like I say, we'll be using the damage map system. And what we're planning on doing is when you go to repair, you'll be basically patching the holes caused by damage and restoring the metals in the area. But obviously, because it's not a paint gun as well, it's not magic, you'll basically be restoring it back to almost like a burnished metal structure. So if you've seen somebody who's been through the wars a bit and got out of their cockpit and patched up their ship as a bit of an emergency, they'll be arriving back at port with big shiny metal filling holes in their ship, like they've had a bad day at the dentist almost. Actually, the basic functionality that we're doing for FPS, we're going to be using on the Drake Vulture as well, because that's obviously got the stripping guns to strip on a much larger scale compared to FPS. But obviously, as Jared said, this is just the very, very first layer of salvage. The next iteration of hand salvage will be to start stripping individual materials from ships. So very similar to what we've done with the recent medical UI, when you look at a ship, you'll be able to get some readouts of what the integrity of the hull is, which you can either take away or restore based on if you're salvaging or repairing. And then... lost my train of thought now. So when you go and start trying to grab individual materials from a ship, the UI will obviously tell you what you're looking at, what you'll be gathering, and that will be an additional complexity: if I repair my ship with this substance, I will get more of its integrity back if I'm repairing the wing with the correct thing, basically. So that's the next iteration of hand salvage. And then further down the line, obviously, we're going to build on that for the ship, which is the cutting off parts and taking those on and cutting away and using the muncher that we've got on the Reclaimer, for example; that will be coming down the line as well. So I just want to stress that this is the very first dive into salvage that we're going to have, rather than it being what it's going to end up being for everything. And obviously, we've got a couple of tools that we're going to have. We've got the multi-tool and a dedicated tool as well. For now, the dedicated tool is going to be limited to using this universal material, but it'll be able to strip faster, has a higher capacity and stuff. Whereas down the line, that will be using the separated material functionality that we've just talked about.