How often do you take into account internal modularity, such as changing rooms, decorations, storage and furniture, e.g. switching a weapon rack for a shelf? How modular do we get?

Depends on the ship. Sometimes we build the modularity for gameplay reasons, like the Retaliator modules, where that entire room can come out and be a different room. But also sometimes for art production reasons, like the Vanguard rework. The Hoplite central pod room is, well, across all the Vanguards, it's essentially four bays now, two on each side. And Joe, the artist who's worked on it, has built those bays to be modular. If you want to go nuts, you could build a Vanguard variant that had eight beds in it and no bathroom or anything, because they all just fit in those big slots. It's partly for ease of use in production, because for the other variants now we've moved some of the bits around, and rather than building two beds on the left-hand side built into the wall, now we have to build two on the right side. It's literally taking the geometry and putting it back in another way. For the Hoplite, we built a set of two jump seats with gun racks that go in that bay that can be cut and pasted around, so it speeds up art production. It's more efficient in memory. You're just loading one asset and instancing it. You're not having to load duplicate geo. But for gameplay reasons, we tend to stick to big wholesale changes rather than letting you swap your wardrobe for a gun rack.

Now, we use the term modularity a lot, and there's a stretch goal for enhanced ship modularity. We essentially have two types of modularity. We have developer modularity, what we use to build the ships, and then we have player-facing modularity. You touched on that a little bit: the Retaliator rooms, the living room, the bomb bay, the jump seats. That's player-facing modularity, the stuff that will come through the ship customization feature when that comes online. But what we're talking about here, when we build the ships, that's the developer modularity. That's to help with performance. That's to help with draw calls.

It's the same on the interiors of big ships as well. Those corridors aren't unique pieces. It's a two-meter wall section, a one-meter wall section, a four-meter wall section, an inside curve and an outside curve, repeated everywhere. It's part of the reason the Hammerhead was so quick to put in production, because that is the Idris kit with a new material on it and some new bespoke component hatches. The rest of that is all the work we've done on the Idris, rebranded.