[With engineering coming,] as we approach nearly 200 ships, you have to go back and not just convert the old ships to work with the new system, adding components and so on, but also make sure you build the new ones with this in mind. How's that been?

That's been crazy. It's a huge amount of work, and it isn't just, they finish the feature, here's how you do it, off you go. We work with them to do the prototypes for it as well, so we actually test out and implement it on, normally, a test vehicle that gets chosen. But then to go back, because we've been developing ships for eight, nine, ten years at this point, how we've set stuff up over the years has changed as well. So how we have to deconstruct and then reconstruct it to work is different depending on when the ship was released. So on top of having to actually get the ships out and release all the new content, any downtime is spent on a combination of either bug fixing, quality of life for existing ships, or doing all of this feature support. Right now, the entirety of the vehicle design team is off doing tweaks and changes to improve how the features coming out in December feel and play. And we're actively making changes from what we thought it was going to be to what feels better and is a better experience. Literally right now, the team is sat doing it.

Yeah, part of the challenge is even simple things like making sure the ships have got fire extinguishers. We've known that's been coming for a while, and we've been adding them to a lot of our ships as soon as we knew that was coming. But we didn't necessarily know exactly how that system was going to work, and we had no real way of testing it. So really now, a lot of the time, you think, oh yeah, most ships have got them, it's fine, but we still need to go through, test them all, make sure they all work, and realise that, oh, actually, there's a bit of collision that is a tiny bit too big. It looks fine, but we had no way of testing it. And it's those sort of little things that catch us out. On the art side, we're probably in a better place because our side is less impacted by it. I think it's really the design side that's weathering the...

For engineering, there's a lot that goes into it that the players just don't see. We could spend two hours talking about how we do it, but essentially we've been doing this process under the hood over the last 18 months, two years, near enough: basically stripping out the old item pipe system and replacing it with the resource network. That was a lot of manual labor. The way it's been in the game since before 4.0, all the items have basically just automatically connected themselves. That was just to get the system in functional. And now we've been doing the passes of actually physically linking all the items correctly to the relays. So people will have seen, in larger multi-crew ships that have released in the last two years, physical relays, physical items, and it's literally connecting up the resource network for those. So when you have a ship that has an engineering screen, you can see all these connections, you can manage it. And for the initial release, everything will support engineering. It just comes in different stages. Obviously, everything has to work, step one. It's not always a guarantee, let's just be real. But obviously, a single-seater is less work and has fewer requirements than, say, the Polaris. In a single-seater, you have the ability to repair your items through the MFD. And that's our fallback case for a ship that doesn't have physical components: you'll be able to do that gameplay from the cockpit, from an MFD. And then as we go through the ships, physicalizing all the items and adding engineering screens (again, not every ship will have an engineering screen, because it just doesn't make sense), you get more and more of that gameplay unlocked. But it's not like a ship that doesn't have physical components is way better for the gameplay than one that does. They both get impacted the same.