Is there any timetable for when cargo pods on certain ships will be usable for missions, like the Hornet cargo pod for retrieving the black box after NPC missions, or the saddlebags on the Prospector?
TL;DRCargo pods mounted outside a ship's interior can't be used for missions yet because mission items can't snap into such cargo grids; upcoming inventory work should help, with no timetable given.
I suspect that will be similar tech to the Caterpillar detaching.
Some of them, anyway. Some of them, yes, definitely. The limitation on them at the moment is that pickable mission items can't be snapped into cargo grids. And cargo grids themselves have to be inside the physics grids of ships for them to be registered. So these ships that have them on the outside don't work currently. But I think a big thing that will help will be the inventories that are being worked on for FPS mining and other mechanics, where you will be able to sort of transfer your item to another item. It will be the same basic mechanics as that, but one scale up: you're transferring something that has things in it in your hands to another container, which will be the ship.
That'll allow things like the Stor-All for the Aurora, the cargo pod for the Hornet, the saddlebags for the Prospector, all those things that aren't in an interior physics grid, to be usable.
Things like the Hull C as well also need it.