With another large ship added, the Perseus, conspicuously lacking the option to reserve a name, even if it wouldn't be visible in game, can someone please give us an update on the intentions around ship naming? We've had absolutely no word in years to confirm or deny that the original reservation system is still aligned with the team's philosophy. If it is, then what's stopping you from adding ship naming on the web hangar site so we can reserve the unique names we have in mind?

From a vehicle content point of view, there are two things there. Since we introduced vehicle naming and serials with the Hercules and a slew of other ships, we've done the setup on all the ships to support having names. So anything in the last three or four years has the setup for it. At least from an art point of view, we're not particularly happy with how it works, because it's basically a fixed-size, maximum 32-character string that goes on the exterior of the vehicle. If you name your ship 'B', it's the same size B as if you had 32 Bs in a line, so it doesn't look great. It doesn't react to the paints. We get to pick the font and the color in the current system. So if you've got a black hull ship with a white font, it looks great on the default. Put a white paint on it, and it doesn't react to that. We need to enhance that: either the paints have an override for the serial numbers and colors, or the serials do some magic to detect that. And we also want to highlight them with lighting. Like you see on the Enterprise, it has little lights that illuminate the name and the serial number. And we need that to work with the dynamic scaling side of it as well. So from a content side, it works, but we're not particularly happy with it. There's also a huge amount of work on the platform side that they would need to answer for. I know it's a hugely manual process, because so many people own so many ships, and because they're unique names, they do it in a wave system. So you need to work out the owners of every ship, divide them into waves, give each wave time, and like I say, it's manual, and then it has to be approved, because people on the internet put naughty words on the outside of their spaceships. Basically it needs feature work. We can do it, but it's a huge amount of manual work.

It just needs feature work. We set all the ships up. There's some polish and niceties, we would like to improve the visuals, but then it's more on the feature side.

We need it to be scalable as well. The time investment to set it up is huge. There needs to be a more practical way to do it.