Do you want to talk about the balance that you're doing for the two ships in particular, the Retaliator and the Constellation?

So when going over doing balance for the Retaliator and Constellation, getting that into the state that we would want it is interesting. Generally, our goals are to have it so that a multi-crew situation just comes out on top. We want you to be able to take advantage of having multiple people doing things, from shield management and radar to turrets and placing bullets in all directions. So to that end, we kind of envision the Constellation has been built to have a really devastating forward-facing armament. And the Retaliator has its torpedoes and missiles, and those are of course to do a ton of damage. As far as actual dogfighting, it's more about having fewer places to go where you can't be hit. So it should have guns on you at all times. So it's a matter of who is able to manage their multi-crew better. And I think that means that in a situation where you have only one player in a Retaliator and only one player in a Constellation, you'd probably expect to see the Constellation come out on top, because the Retaliator is juggling more of its things. Because of the Constellation's forward-facing priority, the pilot has a little bit more control over that. But once you have anybody in a turret, once you start having the full armament, a fully crewed Retaliator is going to be a force to be reckoned with. And we're looking at revisiting all of our DPS values on our weapons by size, looking to expand out the turret variety. So like we did with the Hornet and the Cutlass being able to swap out their mounts for more specialist weapons, you'll be able to do similar things on the Constellation and Retaliator. And we're putting in all the balance numbers to really support that.

Plus there's that interesting balance between the five 360-degree turrets on the Retaliator versus the two that are on the Constellation, with the four slightly gimbaled, forward-facing size three weapons on the Constellation. The dozens of size two and size one missiles that are on the Constellation versus the four huge torpedoes that are on the Retaliator. Those are also forward-facing. That dynamic between how much damage you're doing per weapon and how devastating those are against each other are the things that we're trying to balance. And it's a challenge, but I think we're getting there.

It goes into flight as well. The Retaliator has extra armor that the Constellation doesn't have, so its hull is naturally stronger. The shield is a bit stronger as well, although the Constellation shields are currently tuned to recharge faster. So you've got the more maneuverable Constellation versus the more heavily armored Retaliator. But there's just a bunch of different areas where they have some interesting balance going on.

And some weaknesses we have on the Constellation right now are because of the incompleteness of the stations, especially the engineering stations, right now. Once we get that designed and implemented further, the copilots will have a lot more say in the battle and the outcome of the battle, specifically by doing things like shunting power to shields, deciding which shields get what, turning on and off certain components. When we get that system in, it's going to be a lot more interactive, I think, as far as what each crew member has [to do with] the outcome of the head-to-head battles.

Yeah, just overall, next year we're going to see a lot of great headway, especially for what is going to make a multi-crew ship sing. Even the stuff Kirk was mentioning, for making all the stations work out, a lot of that is our big avionics computer systems in our ships. These things aren't just for one purpose or another; they drive everything digitally in your ship, so we have to make sure all that's set, so then when you're doing this insane Macross-style missile volley with your Constellation...

Which we've seen a lot of videos of, which is awesome.

Yeah, so long term, that's absolutely going to stay, but as the system gets developed and things become more tangible and meaningful, that'll be a much more deliberate choice you're making for your ship, to be like, no, I want my ship to be this multi-target missile boat that people are afraid of. Or you want to set your ship up where, no, I can just drill all of my missiles on one guy, locking on extremely fast and getting a new volley out there. So a lot of good choices that we want you guys to be making coming down the road.

And hopefully we'll get the Merlin to be actually pilotable and be another either escape ship or help you out in the battle itself.