There's been a focus in the latest patches on atmospheric and re-entry effects, but so far there doesn't seem to be much sound variation between flying in atmosphere and in space, nor during re-entry and exit. Is this planned to change soon?

Yeah, there's definitely a difference. In space, you've just got the sound of the, we call them ship-wide audio objects, like the sounds of the cockpit kind of whining and humming and all the thrusters on your ship. Actually, you've also got vibration in space, but you don't really hear that unless your ship's quite damaged. And then when you enter atmosphere, we bring in what we call environment feedback. So this is the sound of the air rushing over the frame of the ship. And that's reactive to how dense the atmosphere is, how fast the ship's going, all that kind of stuff. And the environment feedback also governs, if you're flying through a snowstorm, you should hear the hail on the windscreen. So we do have that, and if you're on the ground looking up at a ship flying in atmosphere, then it's also different. You get the sort of distant diffuse sound of the ship ripping through the air. If you hear a pass-by in space, it sounds a lot different, a lot more muffled. I think it really depends at the moment what ship you're flying in atmosphere as to how much difference you hear, because a lot of the ships that haven't had an audio pass in a long time have this kind of really, really broadband sound design aesthetic to them. Everything's really washy and covers the whole frequency spectrum. It doesn't leave much room for the slightly more simple sounds of wind and hail hitting the windscreen and stuff. But some of the ships we've given a pass recently, it caused quite a stir, the Cutlass Black, for us to redesign. And a few of the more modern ones like the Carrack and the Banu Defender, they have far less mid-frequency content in the actual ship sound, more bottom end and top end, which frees up the mids, so you hear a lot more of the vibration and all of the weather sound and wind sound against the ship. Hopefully that's the plan.

So it sounds like a lot of the sound design for the ships is individual to each ship. And what you're saying is that newer ships have newer tech, newer techniques, newer features, and maybe some of the older ones could probably stand to get a little more attention.

Yeah. It's just that we kind of figured out what works and what doesn't over time. And some ships, unfortunately, need to be revisited at some point.

It's like the phrase painting the Humber Bridge. You keep painting a bridge, you get to the other end, and when you finish painting it, you've got to go back to the other end and start again. The number of ships that we have.