Realistically, will there be a lot of work involved getting the older ships up to standard in terms of newer design practices and upcoming tech, i.e. relay cabinets, airlocks, bulkheads, et cetera, or have they been designed in such a way to easily add these things with minimal alterations?

I think it's a bit of both. From very early on in the project's life, metrics were established for what we thought was all of the ship items we would require. And from that point, we made sure that they were accommodated in the ships we were designing. It's sometimes impossible to have a crystal ball and see that far into the future, though. If we take the resource network stuff that's going on at the moment, that's a great example: we knew we needed an item in there. We thought we would need one item of a certain size, so that's the item we accounted for. Now that feature is starting to be developed, and design documents are being written, and people are starting to actually develop and playtest and see what it's like, we realized that actually it wasn't going to be particularly fun, or the feature team realized it wasn't going to be particularly fun. So from their point of view, oh yeah, it'd be great if we could add this and add that, especially on our larger multi-crew ships. A core element of what Star Citizen is, is this multi-crew gameplay. And I think there's certain things where you can just go, actually, yeah, do you know what? It's a little bit of a compromise, but we're happy with this for the amount of time it would take. But in this case, personally, I would much rather make it fun and make it good. And if it means that we need to put a little bit more time into doing it, I think that's fine. In general, we're lucky that a lot of our larger ships have some space. We've allocated space for them. If we've got something that's Hammerhead sized or whatever, and we need to go in and add some additional items that are relatively small and can be swapped out and the player can carry them, that's not too much of an issue. It becomes more of an issue when we've got a ship that's right at the limit of its size class, and we want to take the power plant from the back and move it to the front because we want to add a bit more excitement into the gameplay. If there's not room for it, it means that, well, we need to extend the exterior of the ship. And if the exterior of the ship needs extending, it means it might bump up a size class. And if that ship is supposed to fit in another ship's hangar, then it no longer fits in there. So there's a lot of knock-ons from what you would think of as quite a simple change of, oh, can we just add an extra meter here? Can we just shift this room about a little bit? If it starts really impacting the exterior of the ships and the size of the ships, it just causes a lot of headaches. That's not to say we'll never be doing it. It's just we've only got a finite amount of time and we want to make sure we spend that time wisely. And I think we focus it on stuff that's going to really improve the fun of a feature. I'm rambling.

To give a good example of how things change over the years: as soon as we're aware of a gameplay feature coming in that affects the ships, we work with that team to try and mitigate any knock-ons for us. But sometimes things are just wildly out of our control. So the example is, probably five years ago, we used to have a radar item on a ship, and we made the metric for it, and it was basically a cube. At some point after that was decided, another team was like, hey, no, we're not going to have a radar item. We're going to have a radar and a scanner item. And I'm like, well, we just spent all this time carving out this space in all the ships. So sure, we can do that. But what we'll do is we'll carve that metric in half. And then you have these oblong or rectangular boxes, one for the radar, one for the scanner. And then relatively recently, that team has gone, actually, we're just going to have the radar now. We're not going to need a scanner. I was like, oh, fine. We've got all these spaces now that have no use. And handily, the resource network came along and went, hey, guys, we need a space on every ship to put at least one relay. I'm like, ha, have I got the space just for you to put these relays in. So sometimes it works in our favor. Sometimes it doesn't. But that's game development.