Something I've always found confusing is escape pods. How are they going to be launched from ships? Even on newer ones at gold standard, they don't all seem to have an actual exit point from the hull, and some are quite far away from where the crew would actually be.

I hope all the newer ones have a marked escape point. A few of them are quite hidden. They are a very subtle panel line cutout of where the panel is going to pop off, and they might not always go the way you think they are. Just because they're on the upper floor of a ship, they might not be coming out the top; they might all be coming out the bottom just because of the way we've routed stuff inside. But they all do have an intended way out of the ship. And sometimes some of our suit lockers might look like escape pods, which might be confusing to people, because they're the big vertical standing things. But it's usually the vertical standing escape pods; side escape rafts, like you see in the 890 and Idris, where it's a hexagonal box; on the back of the Argo... it goes outside; or it might be ejection beds, like you see in the rear of the Freelancer. But in terms of, hey, how do I get to them, because my ship just explodes right now: again, this is tied to physical damage, so I wouldn't expect escape pods to become a thing until that comes online. Because until that point, we do have the whole 'hey, my ship has 10,000 health, it gets to zero, it goes bang.' We don't have that finesse where, well, with physical damage there isn't a health pool. So it's basically degrading your ship to the point it becomes non-functional, at which point you go, hey, it's time to get off this ship. So you will have that grace period, which could be seconds, depending on if shots end up going into your power plant. But ideally, it's going to be multiple minutes, if not hours, where your ship is crippled, non-responsive, and you go, right, now is the time to get off this ship. So it's very much a future thing. It's planned in for the future, not for the current gameplay.