Is it possible to steal components from a ship? Can you board and take out the hyperdrive with grabby hands?
TL;DRComponents are too large and heavy to pull out by hand, so removing them will likely need a vendor or repair shop, though sub-components can be taken and sabotage is meant to be deliberate rather than trivial.
Components are not really designed to be hand-manipulable. They're too large. They're too heavy. You will be able to move these things as cargo items, but you'll need to do that as cargo items, so actually pulling it out before it becomes cargo, before you would use it in the same way with the gravity jack and all these systems that we have in place for cargo... I think that at this point it's kind of unlikely that we'll allow you to just go in and make that sort of on-the-fly hot swap, actually take out a component. That's probably going to be more the kind of thing that you'll see: you'll have to go to a vendor, go to some garage or repair shop to be like, all right, I want that thing taken out, and then they will do that for you, because these things are too large for grabby hands. The sub-components of components are what grabby hands is for. So you'll be able to open it up and, yeah, you'll be able to pull out the capacitor of a shield generator and then put it in your pocket. But that only reduces the capacity of these components. It doesn't negate it completely.
Something also, even touching on that a bit, is a lot of it will also depend on what kind of ship you're interacting with, because, yeah, if it has the right size class components and the right interior access panels, it may be something that you could do a tool-assisted removal of to get it into that cargo state. But if it's on some of the smaller single-seat ships, not all of their core components will actually even be accessible from the inside, so to really get at those parts, you're going to be trashing that ship to get to those parts. So it won't be something where it's like you just board someone's ship, that ship's fully operational, and you just unplug their motherboard. It'll be a more deliberate and consequential action.
Sounds like you sold out on sabotage.
I mean, we want to support sabotage, but it also shouldn't be trivial.
It won't be progress-bar, push-button sabotage, it will be a thought-out process of sabotage.