What can you tell us, if anything, about the sensor-dampening cargo area for the Phoenix?
TL;DRThe Phoenix will get a shielded cargo bay that makes scanning harder, while the Taurus gets a separate hidden compartment where the underside turret would be, though the speakers can't stop players from finding it.
Well, it's hard to talk about it without going into the history, but briefly, there were a lot of crossed wires from the development side, and we don't want to take away stuff that has been accidentally promised, but it was never supposed to be in there. But because we've said it's in there, what we're going to do is: you can have shielded cargo, and a lot of ships make use of that, but you can also have hidden cargo, and the two, whilst linked, are not the same thing. So shielded is, it's a known place. It can be found, but it takes extra effort to discover what's inside it via scanning. Hidden is, it's an unknown place, and if it's shielded as well, it requires extra effort. So the Phoenix cargo bay is shielded. If anyone knows the Phoenix, they're going to know there's probably cargo in there, but they're going to have to spend time doing it.
It's a big giant cargo bay in the same place as it is on every other Constellation.
Yeah. What's different with the Taurus, and where it was actually supposed to be from, is it lost that underside turret. And you have to do a bit of suspension of disbelief and not think, why is that turret missing? I wonder what could be there. But for NPC and AI behaviors, that is the shielded, hidden cargo bay. That thing is the really secret area, and we talked about this for the Star Runner cargo pocket. So it has its normal huge cargo bay, which is bigger than all the other ones, and then it has that secondary shielded and hidden area that you can put your... well, you can put whatever you want in there, but I presume it's not going to be good stuff.
So to just sum up, the Phoenix will have its cargo bay shielded. It's not a bespoke component. It's going to be like the materials that the cargo bay is made of will deflect sensors. It interferes with scanning. So it'll be harder to tell what's in the cargo bay of a Phoenix than it would be in a Freelancer or something like that. While the Taurus will have its hidden compartment where the bottom turret usually is on the Constellation, like intended. So NPCs won't know to look there.
Obviously, we can't do anything about players. Players are going to be players.