How will we access ship components for smaller ships, like the Aurora, the Arrow, etc.?
TL;DRShip components are physical and generally accessed from outside through panels, but the team is still deciding how to do this without costly geometry cuts, and not every ship is converted yet.
All the vehicles in the game have components. They're all physicalized. We don't cheat anything. Everything has a space, which some people don't realize when they're looking at ships and they're like, why has this huge ship got such a tiny interior? It's because the components have taken up the rest of the space. For obviously bigger ships, you access them from the outside. From smaller ships, you access them from the outside generally. They're always going to be behind panels that open up. We're doing some development at the moment to decide the best way of doing that. Obviously, if we start cutting up all our ships and putting dozens of panels on the outside, that just blows the cost of them. So we're looking at ways that we can not do that, but still have that gameplay of: I go up to something on the outside of my ship, it opens up without having to have artists cut holes in geometry, and you get components out of it. Talking with the graphics guys, we've got some interesting things we're going to try to do.
Not every ship has been converted to the full component system.
No, it's an ongoing process. Any ships that have been built in the last year or so, you'll see spaces for them in the ships. And some quite a lot older, but particularly the single-seaters where you can't get into them, we'll be going back and finishing them off.
Some of those new ships already have panels.
Yep, a lot of the new ships do. Even some of the smaller ones, you have the panel lines ready for when we decide which way to go with the tech to do that.