How will self-destruction work in crewed ships? Will stations other than the pilot be able to initiate it? Will there be a countdown?

So in terms of a countdown, yeah, we definitely want it to be something that, unlike the current implementation, where it's more just something for cycling in Arena Commander, where it would be, you're doing a deliberate action, so you'll hear an audible countdown alarm, you'll have that 30 seconds until the core goes exploding. And that's sort of a two-part thing of, one, make sure the guys on your ship have a fair chance to get off, but also that give and take where now the people who may be attacking you also should get a chance to possibly disable that self-destruct. And in terms of who can trigger it, it will most likely be restricted to either A, the owner of a ship, like the guy on the title, he's the one who owns it, or whoever they have designated as an approved captain of the ship. So it's going to be constricted in who can trigger it. It won't just be random crewman redshirt guy hits the button and everyone dies. It will be, okay, the captain has called for self-destruct.

This goes into the permissions and rules aboard the ship. And setting that up, because we want the players to have the functionality inside the ship to say, hey, I mean, I know this is a bad analogy, but basically treating it almost like a little guild. This ship is basically a little guild, and setting those guild permissions, just MMO speak to talk about, this is how it's set up. This is how people will get the permissions, that people will actually take control, because you're going to have leaders and stuff within your corporation and your organization. So that way, all right, these guys will be able to set these things, but it would be per ship, based on the rules.

And are we going to have a very simple password to blow up the ship? Self-destruct Alpha 1.

I kind of would love to go 1A, 2B. I mean, those things are more just to trigger that countdown. I know I've also mentioned on the forums and even in the chat before a rough concept of basically a snap-destruct. And some people, I think, took that a bit too aggressively initially. But one thing I do want to also mention for that notion of a snap-destruct is that's something where every time I've talked about that, if that goes in, it would have two very distinct limitations: one, only the owner of a ship could ever trigger it, in that you can't make someone a captain and then they get to snap-destruct. You have to be the one who owns the ship and pushes the big red button. And then two, when you push the big red button, you will die. Baseline. You die with the ship if you want to immediately blow it up. So that will be one of the counterbalances in that give and take, because you don't want to die in the PU. It's not going to be the most fun thing.

Couldn't we do something even like a handshake, where you have two designated people being like, hey, we're doing a snap-destruct, put your key in, put your key in, two locks?

We could. In theory, we could do that, but the owner of the ship would have to be one of those people. Either way, it's in development. It'll get iterated. We're not going to make something that's going to just infuriate more people than it'll entertain.