So do you ever think about how players might be able to swap out components [and use ships in other ways]?
TL;DRThe team designs for what players are likely to do but can't anticipate everything, doesn't check every object that might fit inside, and treats unexpected uses as emergent gameplay that may inform future design.
Yeah, we always think about... We know what the players do. Everything that we think they're going to do and more. So when we're designing ships, we know this is what we want it to do. We can make a safe bet that people are going to try and do this with it, forever asking what fits in what. We know that everyone's always going to try and cram another ship inside another ship. So we know what we want it to do. We know within reason what it could do with some stretching. We can never think of what everyone would do. Reclaimer arm wrestling. Reliant jousting.
I mean, we don't do a big Benny's check, do we? We don't try to figure out how many Big Benny's can get into the back of something.
If it's designed to fit something particular, we'll check that, but we don't tend to check every single object that the universe can fit inside it.
I think the phrase we use is emergent gameplay. We put it out there for the intended purpose, and then the community no doubt shows us all of its other capabilities.
And the thing is, because we're quite an agile company anyway, if people are doing something repeatedly, we can start to incorporate that into future design, I would say.
The dream of using the Caterpillar as a broadside machine, sitting there loading it up with cannons or with railguns and using it like the old-style sailing ship broadsides.
I've seen people with the Caterpillar with just the doors open, Arrows landed on every single one. It's now an aircraft carrier. And that was never designed to be like that, but that's happened, and it's cool.