Will people be able to attack and damage the actual hull of the ship, the munitions of the ship? Can you blow up the torpedoes inside a Retaliator from the inside?

Definitely still in progress. Yes.

We have talked about this, because components will cook off, right? And if components start exploding, then they'll destroy components around them, and then those could also explode outwards, and then basically hull and so on. So there's so much stuff that could be damaged.

It is tied into the component system, so components will have cascading damage, so that if the power plant blows up, or overheats, that will start affecting the rest of the pipe system. We've seen the previews of that with the Constellation, seeing this thing blow up and this thing starts sparking until eventually the whole thing just goes and it's gone.

So maybe this whole self-destruct thing doesn't matter, because they can just board the ship and put a charge in the power plant.

If you're attacking, you're not self-destructing someone's ship.

That sort of catastrophic failure generally requires more than one component to fail at the same time.

Which ones in particular?

All the core ones, the power plants and shield generators and thrusters, I mean, engines, rather. So when those things all go off at the same time, you end up with crazy.

Also, if your coolers go down, because then you can just start overheating dramatically and your ship will just...

They're all interconnected, so if your coolers are down, just shutting off the coolers and then overclocking your ship with all your other components can be enough to cause a catastrophic failure. It's a personal goal of mine to make sure that you can completely destroy your ship from the HUD. If you can't push buttons that destroy your ship, then do you really have control? But conceptually, blowing up munitions or setting off mines and other explosive charges inside a ship should and could function the same way as doing this sort of component damage, where you take damage to the area and we propagate it out to whatever local components are there. They do their normal damage behaviors, which could potentially be affecting the rest of the ship. And when you reach levels that are sufficiently catastrophic to destroy the ship, it happens naturally. That's the theory of it, none of which we've actually done in engine. So until that happens, it's all design and ideas and things that we're still working through, but there will always be more consequences to these than there even appears to be. There does appear to be a lot.