Can the Reclaimer's rear cargo platform be adjusted to avoid blocking 8+ SCU of cargo?
TL;DRThe Reclaimer's cargo platform issue is known and a quick fix will be made only if one is easy, but its whole interior needs a redo, and it will get an update rather than a Mk II.
Again, another ship, knowing what we know today, would not exist in its current form. The Reclaimer's an interesting one. I'm aware of that issue. It's something, if I can find someone free to do it, but it's a snowball effect with the Reclaimer. The way it was built back in the day is not conducive to quick and easy changes. You change that, you end up having to change a lot of the rear rooms. And this is an interesting quirk we found when we did the Hull C. So obviously the Hull C took forever to come out. We did a lot of the work 2017, 2018, and then we waited years for the features to be ready. And when we came back to it, the way we build ships now is different to then. And the rooms we hadn't done, we did, and the two clashed visually significantly. So we sort of ended up having to downgrade the current art style and slightly up-res the old art style to make it not look so jarring. And the Reclaimer would suffer from the same thing. So in my opinion, if there's something quick and easy we can do, we'll do it, but that whole interior needs a complete redo, a reimagining.
Obviously we've started seeing Mk IIs with the Hornets and stuff like this. And I imagine some ships will probably just get a Mk II. Other ships like the Reclaimer, the Caterpillar, need some more TLC, need some more time going back and fixing those things.
The question that is starting to pop up more and more is what necessitates or drives the reason for a Mk II versus just updating the existing one. And really that comes down to: we can do a Mk II for something that functions and we just want to sort of deprecate the visual style of it. The Hornets, for example, there's nothing wrong with the Mk I Hornets. We just wanted to have the cooler Mk II Hornets visually out there. But for things like the Reclaimer, if we made a Mk II Reclaimer, we've still got to make the Mk I Reclaimer actually function how it's supposed to function with the salvage mechanic, at which point that's redoing a lot of it. So there won't be a Mk II Reclaimer, the amount of work will just be an updated Reclaimer.