How is weight calculated, and what are its effects, such as ship overloading?

Yeah, it's all related. There's two answers to this. Both are the correct answer, but it depends what project you're working on. So obviously in Squadron, it's Maelstrom, and that does a lot of the work for you. So depending on the material you apply to the ship, or per parts of the ship, like you could have left wing be one material, right wing be another, you set the thickness of it. It calculates the surface area of that part based on the physics mesh of it, does some clever maths for the thickness value provided, and then that part is that weight. So you apply a titanium wing, it's lighter than a steel wing, and it all just goes into the physics engine and just works, TM. Star Citizen is different because we don't have Maelstrom, in that it's more designer-y numbered, and the process we've done for years is you take a rough volume of the ship and 3ds Max calculates the volume of it. And we put it into an Excel that I made years ago. And you take that volume, you take away the volume of the interior space, which is another mesh. That gives you a volume of the hull. You multiply that by a density value we decided, which has some plus or minus, like plus 5% for Aegis because it's a combat manufacturer, versus Origin, which is all high tech and carbon-fibery, plasticky stuff. That gives you a mass for the entire ship, and you put that on the entire ship, and then the game engine goes, about 50% of the volume of this ship is this part, so I'm going to put 50% of that mass here. And that's why occasionally you see things behave oddly, because the physics is misinterpreted. Maybe the asset has a slightly dodgy physics proxy and it thinks it's got 5% of the mass when it should have 50% of the mass, and it flies off into space, or the reverse. So again, that's the reason for having Maelstrom: those designer numbers go away, to be replaced with ones that are actually fully derived from the assets themselves. And it does impact flight in both games. In Star Citizen, if you strip weapons and components off your ship, you will fly slightly faster. The ships are quite heavy, so removing a hundred kilo gun off your 60 ton spaceship isn't going to move the needle that much, but it does. And cargo will impact it. It doesn't currently for any ship where the cargo grid is inside, because we're intentionally ignoring that at the moment. But for ships like the Hull C, Hull A, the Raft now, everyone's new favorite ship, if it's on the outside of a ship, it does account for that. So you will feel like if you've loaded your Raft up with gold, it's going to fly a lot slower and heavier than one that is empty.