What's your favorite challenge when designing or building spaceships?

Well, me and John are two of the rare people who get to see it from Chris's head or John's head right up until it's in the game. So I think for me, my favorite challenge is getting it out to the backers. But it's very challenging sometimes, just keeping everybody on track, making sure everybody's communicating with each other, making sure metrics are correct, making sure that Chris has seen it and he likes it. It's all those key stages that add up to the end point of getting it out. It's challenging, but I like it.

There's a lot of challenges. I think there's one challenge that I really sort of hate, but it's also part of the process, which is basically going from the ideation phase of sketches, where you can go in so many different directions, and it's that sort of coalescing and transforming it into the 3D and really picking your direction. That part is, for me, the most difficult, because it's the most troublesome. There's a lot of feedback and a lot of iteration. But once we're on the road, on the road to Rome, on the road to success, you're like, okay, we're heading towards the second pass, great. Okay, now I know what I'm doing, we're on it. So you can't hide from it. It's just part of the process.

I think the favourite but also the most challenging thing for me is not leaking ships that I know about that are in production, because we often work sometimes a year, 18 months ahead of what people publicly know about. And there's been many times where I've been sat at events talking to a backer and they're like, oh, it'd be really cool if you could just do this ship, and it's like this. And you feel bad not being able to say, oh, it's happening.

I've already almost done it four times during this interview.

There's many things I've said today where I'm very careful how I describe this thing.