Will there be a difference in problems, issues and capabilities between manufacturers? Will Drake have more electrical faults on average than an Origin ship? Is there anything manufacturer-specific built in for this?

There are actually two answers to that question. So the first part is every ship will have a somewhat bespoke layout of where the relays will be located and how they will be connected. There will be differences between military ships and civilian ships, with military ships having more relays than civilian ships to allow for more redundancy. There will also be differences between manufacturers, just because of the way that their ships are looking, because we have to fit the relays on them, and that also dictates how the relay or the resource network is actually set up. And so there comes the first difference from. And the second is ship item manufacturers. So it's less Drake itself. So if you have a very expensive power plant you put in your Drake ship, it will not suddenly work worse because it's sitting in a Drake ship. No, it will still... the wear and tear rate will be different. So if you invest more money in your ship items, they are less likely to be affected by wear and tear. Malfunctions might even be triggered less often. So item choice will matter in that regard. So even coming back to the single player: if you invest a lot of money into your ship and buy the best items ever, you even reduce the amount of interactions you have to have with items. So it's more likely that you don't have to run around alone in your ship and try to fix it.

Yeah, and also in addition to brands, I think we already have it in-game: you have the different classes of items, in the sense you have competition, military, industrial, civilian. That's also part of the balance in there. A competition item would probably have a pretty short lifespan, because we expect you, after the race, to go back, change it altogether or repair it, while an industrial or military part is expected to be in the field for a longer time. So that will affect the wear and tear rate and obviously, therefore, some of the other...

The grades will get a different meaning, like the types will get a new meaning to that.

Oh, also, since again, this goes back to the damage system, because without damage penetration and stuff like that, we don't actually get the fires or the actual damaging of the components. There, the hulls also become a bit more relevant, the armor, what materials the manufacturers normally use. We already have some differences planned: this brand usually uses this type of alloy, which has certain properties, which is how you get lighter ships or heavier ships or less armored ships as a rule.