What can you tell us about how transient jump points will be discovered in the future?
TL;DRTransient jump points are to be found through their unique radar signatures, with exploration ships and new swappable radars expected to detect them further and give more information, though swappable radar isn't expected in 4.0.
That sort of exploration of transient jump points is something that I'm pretty excited about, because I want to build more places of interest in the universe in general, and jump points are a cool one because we want to have this kind of Swiss cheese effect of you can go from one system to another in various ways. We were just talking about having a variety of different jump points that fit different ships. But how you discover those: a jump point has a radar signature. And just like every radar signature, that signature is unique. And so different radars can have better sensitivity to different types of signatures. And different radars can give you different information about those signatures: how strong it is, how far away it is, how long the tunnel is, how big the tunnel is. There's a lot of stuff that we could potentially give about those transient jump points when we have a lot more of them, and finding them with the right radar and the right ship. Our exploration ships, like the Carrack for instance, which is our flagship exploration ship, I expect that once we build up these radars that are specifically created for exploration to find things like jump points, they will be attuned to find those at greater distances and give you more information. So that's where we're heading with that.
One of the talking points is, if folks remember, many years ago, 2017, 2018, John Crewe and I wrote a series of articles for the website called The Shipyard, where we broke down the future of ship development and the component system and performance versus military and so on. A big chunk of that is finally being realized alongside the resource network system. So we're now here at the true start of this journey of swappable components and deciding what kind of quantum drive, what kind of thrusters, what kind of this and that you put on your ship to specifically tune it. And radar will be one of those. I don't think the swappable radar is in 4.0, but...
No, but when we start doing transient jump points, we will absolutely retrofit our different ships to have those radars. We want our exploration ships to be able to find those more easily, so we'll absolutely do that.
Or just provide more radars to swap out, as opposed to going back and retrofitting the ships.
Well, yeah, it's not so much retrofitting. Adding the components that players can swap out themselves. Those radars don't exist right now, but we will create them specifically for the transient ones.