What are our long-term plans [for damage]? People are asking why a ship has health and armor that multiplies it; I thought the different components were going to have health. Let's talk about the difference between balancing for the game now versus our long-term plans.

I'll try and briefly go over it all. Like you said, we balance for the game as it is now. How we do stuff is how we can do it. The long term goal is still going to be the whole component-driven behavior. So rather than ships having an artificial health pool and armor as a flat reduction, it will be physically based damage. So the parts of the ship will have strength based on their materials. Projectiles will have mass and velocity, and then that will be how the damage is calculated; penetration will fall out of that. Energy weapons, obviously, well, lasers don't have any mass or very, very little mass, but they have velocity, so they'll be great at some things. Ballistics have mass, less velocity, and that's shields. The lore of the shields is that they slow down mass, so that's why energy weapons are great against them, and they sort of eat it all up and deplete the shields. Ballistics go through them because the mass, it slows the mass down. It doesn't stop the mass, it slows it down. And they've got enough mass to go through and then hit the hull underneath, whereas lasers and energy weapons don't have that. So we're still going towards that long-term goal of doing it that way. Very simulation driven. We've been talking about it for a long time. We started looking into it when we were first talking about it, and we sort of realized that there was a lot of pieces of the puzzle that we had to get in place first, mostly to do with getting everything to Item 2.0. So for 3.0, most of the ship components got done for Item 2.0. At the moment, we're finishing converting the weapons, which is naturally a very big part of this whole new damage behavior that we'll be going towards. Everything has to be Item 2.0 to work nicely with each other. You could sort of do it before, but it wouldn't have been efficient and would have resulted in a lot of wasted time. So all the pieces of the puzzle had to be Item 2.0: ships, weapons, ammo, and sort of all of that. And then you've got to actually come up with the rule sets for it all, which we're working on at the moment. So whilst, yes, the ships have a health pool now and the armor does X and shields do Y, that is simulating to the best of our abilities future behavior with what we have. It's not one-to-one. It's not going to stay like this forever. It's going towards that system.

It's one of the unique challenges of having to run a live environment in the middle of game development. Because we are running a live environment in the middle of our game development, one of the difficult things when talking about stuff, whether it's you guys talking about weapon balance yesterday on ATV, or developers talking about piracy gameplay systems, there's always this disconnect between talking about what is going on right now and what we're capable of doing now with the amount of game systems that are online and in place and implemented and working, versus our long-term design goals. We've said for a long time that we want a systemic damage system. It's basically you set all the materials, you set all the features of all the materials, all the components of the ships, and basically it works itself out. It's all energy-based, whether the energy is coming from a laser bolt or it's the kinetic energy involved in a ballistic. We all want to move to the systemic damage system, and it'll happen just like everything else. But where we are right now is what we were really talking about in the segment yesterday.

One of the really cool, interesting things that's going to come out of it is at the moment we talk about time to kill because it's what we have in the game at the moment. It's a very sort of linear concept of ships have health. You get the health to zero, ship goes bang. You don't have that nice way of disabling ships. Whereas when we move to that system, it's less about destroying the ship, more about disabling the components, which in turn disables the ship. And ships are only going to explode when you do critical damage to power plants or huge ammo boxes. And even then, they might not kill the ship. It will cause an explosion, and depending on the tensile strength or the fracture index or the strength of the part and the location of it, that bit might snap off. We've got the ability now to have multiple physics grids in ships. We saw that at Gamescom with the Idris, where it snapped apart, and you couldn't quite see it in the livestream, but we had fun with it in testing in that it snaps apart and it didn't kill the people inside. You could still wander around. You could board the hulk of the Idris hangar that was floating around with all the power out, because the power plants were in the bit that had snapped off. But it was a living bit of ship that was just floating through space. And that sort of gameplay is going to fall out of it naturally.