A while back, CIG stated that ships would be limited not just in what size components they can equip, but also what type of components (civilian, military, industrial). Are these restrictions still intended?

So again, it's something we're discussing at the moment; the vehicle experience team are looking at it. That was quite an old design, so the categories themselves will absolutely stay around, but the actual restriction of 'this ship can only take military and civilian' is something that, the way the discussions are going internally at the moment, is probably not going to stick around, for a few reasons. It's an artificial restriction that doesn't really make any sense when all the components are all identical anyway. It didn't, in theory or practice, really stop people min-maxing loadouts, because there was just so much variety in the categories anyway. And it sort of restricted upgradeability of ships by going, Ben's team has made 5 million components, but you only get access to 50. It's sort of shooting yourself in the foot with long-term gameplay there. And from the balance side, it just made things harder to deal with. So we'll probably be getting rid of those restrictions. Not going to say absolutely yes or no right now. And when we do make a decision, we'll probably update those Shipyard articles to have the latest and greatest info. But the categories themselves will definitely stay the same, and each category will have upsides and downsides for it.

And I think the ship items themselves, they're long overdue a bit of TLC. I think it was 2.6, maybe. It was a while ago, it was when I was fairly new to the company. I remember having taken on those ship items, and yeah, we did a whole load of work getting them ready, and they've not really been greatly touched since. And now we're getting to the point where we are adding them into ships and having the panels open and stuff. I'd really like to see that game loop closed out and really getting that stuff... We went through and made loads of sub-items that go inside your ship items that go inside your ships, and we've got a whole slew of them, and getting all that stuff in, working, feature-ready.