What criteria does a ship need to meet before being selected for a rework or a Mark II?

Okay, multiple layers to that. So, obviously, it needs to have reached a point where it just isn't fulfilling its role in the game. And we use the Aurora Mark I as the example here, because that had both the gold standard and a Mark II. So the Aurora, one of the first five ships in the game. It had changes quite a long time ago, but Star Citizen now as a game, compared to where it was, say, five years ago, is very different. The missions are different. The gameplay is different. What we wanted to do with that ship just couldn't be done with what the Mark I was without fundamentally changing it. So at that point, we decided let's upgrade the Mark I to current methodologies of how we build ships, make it look really good, give it as much as we physically can in the space we have available. That's gold standard. You can play the game with it now. You can competently do things. You can't do everything. And again, it's a starter ship. Not all ships should be able to do everything. It gives you a great taste of the game. Mark II: same ethos, current styling, visuals. So Mark IIs are for where the Mark I is fine, but we want to radically change the visuals, primarily, of a ship. Mark I Hornet to Mark II Hornet: both medium fighters, both have pretty terrifying gun loadouts, visually very different. Aurora's the same, very visually different. As to how and when, primarily that's a resources point of view. There's only so many people that work on ships. They can't do everything all at the same time. We have to pick and choose. We're doing the Kraken at the moment. That's a big investment of time with people. If we weren't doing that, we could do a lot more smaller things. So again, at the director and executive level, we're deciding almost a year in advance where we spend our tokens to develop things. So we have to hit that criteria of: there's a valid need for it; do we have the staff available to do it; and also, is it something the community wants? Not to dismiss some ships over other ones, but there's more value to things like the Aurora and the Hornet that have been here a long time getting a gold standard and a Mark II than a more modern ship.

You say most of the 2027 ship schedule is already set. That's how far ahead of time many of these decisions are made. Sometimes we can fudge a little bit here.

We try very hard. When we start a ship, we don't stop it. We try. On occasions... We try, but it can be very disruptive internally, stopping: are we releasing this, are we not releasing this, are we stopping, are we starting? So once we start something, we try and see it through all the way to the end. And some of these ships can be 6, 12, 18 months of development. So I could say here today, we're going to do X ship. You might not hear about that for another year or so.