Why does the Perseus pilot have control over the ship's torpedoes when the Polaris pilot isn't allowed to use the torpedoes?

I'll let John give the good news.

It is good news. So in 4.5, we're going to allow one of the bridge stations... we were talking about this last night, which one?

We went for the gun, not the missile.

The gun, not the missile. So the back-right station of the Polaris bridge will now have torpedo control as well. You can use it from there. There's still a reason to go down into the depths of the ship to use it, because you then get that 360 camera, and it also has a much larger queue of missiles from there. How many did we settle on? Eight?

Eight.

So if you want to bankrupt yourself, go down to the basement of the Polaris and queue up eight torpedoes. So yes, we do want to, and people will have it in 4.5. So at least they're on the bridge together doing things. Why not the pilot? Because we want to have some enforced balance there. The Perseus torpedoes are way smaller, way less damage compared to the Polaris ones.

It's like when the Mercury Star Runner owners look at the Clipper and it has a second entrance. It's easy to want every ship to have everything. It's real easy and completely understandable from a player standpoint, let's just be real. You have your favorite ship, and your favorite ship can't do something that some other ship does, and that irks. It just makes your brain itch. This is my favorite ship, and I want my favorite ship to do everything, because it's my favorite and this is the last ship I want to fly. Weirdly, that's not exactly great game design. You don't want everybody to just pick one ship and have that be the only ship they ever fly for the remainder of their time in the game, because that becomes boring. You want choice. You want compelling differences between this ship, that ship, and the other ship. So while there are certainly things that can be done, like adding control to another station on the Polaris to bring certain things into parity, you don't want this forced equalization of all things.

Without even looking at the chat over there, I can already tell they're going, well, the Polaris doesn't have this, why does the Idris pilot get the railgun? And I can see that. It's a different problem, in that if you don't give the pilot of a ship that has a fixed weapon on the front of it control over firing that weapon, it's basically useless. You will never hit anything trying to coordinate between two people with something that requires such accuracy. That doesn't mean that we're happy with how powerful that railgun or beam is and won't look to balance that in the future. But it's not justification for the Polaris pilot or co-pilot. Because we also had this discussion: why don't we just give it to the co-pilot on the Polaris? Well, then no one will sit in the pilot seat, because they'll go sit in the co-pilot seat, because they can fly and then shoot the torpedoes at the same time. So it's all a fun multi-layered thing, and it can seem like, oh, they're just ignoring the problem, but there are lots of things to get into.

Yeah, and I think there are loads of balance things, and loads of things that we've just learned over time that we could improve on. And we're not saying we're never going to go back and make improvements to ships, but these guys are trying to balance them.