What are the ships' serial numbers based on?
TL;DRShip serial numbers are based on the persistent unique identifier (GUID) of the ship's entity, which stays until the ship is reclaimed and then changes.
So currently we have a label called a GUID that is a persistent value of the data tag that is associated with that ship. Essentially it's called the ship entity GUID, and that is what it's based on. So it's persistent until you reclaim your ship, and then we entitle you a new ship and that has a different GUID. If you imagine we've got thousands of different entities, tens of thousands of different entities, well, actually hundreds of thousands of different entities in Star Citizen across all of the game, they all need to be uniquely identified. So we have this unique identifier that's assigned to all of these items. It's not just ships. Everything has it. But yeah, for the ships, this was just something that we could base it on. It made sense. Kind of like a number plate. They have to be unique. And that's it, pretty much.