SaltEMike Reacts to Star Citizen Live Q&A: Hangars and Cargo

Multiple distribution centers handling the distribtion of products across a planet make way more sense than a single space station handling all the interplanetary trade and all the distribution for a planet.

The distribution centers make sense to me. The way I see it, product or commodity made or mined in the far reaches of Pyro is packed up and loaded onto a Hull C for shipment to a whole other star system, Stanton. Hull C makes its long journey across Pyro and through the jump point to Stanton. Once in Stanton, it takes a route from one space station to the next, dropping cargo to one or many. That cargo is split up at the stations and sent down to the distribution centers, on the planets, the regional distribution center, one might call them, in C2s and Caterpillars. Those shipments are again broken down and shipped out to the different outposts, both on the planet and its moons, in Hull As, A1s, etc. Then, in reverse, those outposts, like Shubin mining outposts, have cargo that needs to be shipped the reverse direction. Small cargo from outpost to distribution center. Small cargos are combined into medium cargos and sent to stations. Mediums combined to larges and sent across the system or beyond. They can also start doing small cargo missions, sending mining commodities from mining outposts to processing outposts. Not sure why they never started doing that before. They could make a small to medium cargo mission today, where you pickup a cargo load from a Shubin mining outpost and take it to a Shubin processing facility on another moon or a station, with what they have today.

Im at the 9:16 point of this video and I have a few comments: Mike says "they should have just delayed the patch but they didnt bc of the ship sale" but he doesnt remember when we had a literal year of no patches bc the upcoming kept getting delayed.CIG is making a huge point to make 4 patches a year even if they are small, this patch wasnt released JUST for the ship sale, its not like they couldnt just add new ships in a 3.22.x patch. Also Mike is bored bc he has had access to 3.23 for... a month now? He def is a biased voice here, which is cool. Shows the difference between an Evo and someone who isnt.

Other studios would not delay the patch, they would have never told you about the feature till it was 100% green lit to go live. Then a patch would go out for an event or sell. I have not worked on any live service game that did not have hard release dates whose scope had to be adjusted to fit that date.

Make remote locations pay more but accept smaller amounts of freight. That might make the different hulls more useful in different scenarios

I have always been puzzled by why they haven't done something with the Journal alerts. Even if they weren't wired into the whole Tony Z. economy thing, they have them working now. It would be so easy to have the system suddenly alert everyone that there is a substantial discount or paying substantially more on a particular commodity at a particular location that if you hurry, you can make really good profit. I could see cargo people staying glued to those Journal alerts, ready to jump on the latest deal. That literally could be a weekends worth of dev work to add and it would be ongoing compelling game play, that would pit players against each other, that could be put on autopilot. Build some story telling into it about medical supplies being needed desperately, due to Nine Tails attacks in the sector, or Processed Food being low in a sector due to pirate activity, etc..

Other studios don’t communicate what’s in a patch until it’s Locked in, so you don’t know what actually was moved out of a patch.

Great episode. I will always prefer they hold features back and get them right rather than rushing them in half done and broken. Good call by the team. Chad seems like he knows exactly what he's doing. I don't mind waiting longer for this massive change to come in correct.

RIP RMC runs from Rappel, Picker's Field, and Dunboro... unless you are flying a small cargo ship, but it makes sense because making 2 mil per run was OP.

I am Jacks complete lack of surprise

We need basic guild/friends functionality. Permissions, ranks, etc. Orgs buy rights to DC's getting first dibs on better sell/buy prices at the DC. No limit to how many Orgs can buy rights but the more/less with rights changes how big of a piece of the pie you can get making people branch out to other DCs. Miners/hunters etc. in the area might stop bringing their goods to that dc if the volume of a certain item is really high plummeting the sell price. More volume going through the DC could also make rights more expensive pushing orgs out of competition. If we had ranks, permissions and actual roles with functionality it'd be cool if you as a 'distribution manager' in your org with assigned jurisdiction over a specific DC can setup trade routes for the org from the dc to other outposts or maybe you only have permissions to set buy/sell requests here. Which would spawn contracts for your org members that they can take, complete and earn rep in the org. The org leaders could assign different tiers of rep, rewards and permission unlocks allowing the use of org ships, vehicles and assets so they can continue to put more work into the org and move up the ranks. Eventually a player may become a very reputable hauler within that org and because they have a tangible proof of their work the org may request them to do inter system trade routes or high risk jobs through hostile areas. That player's personal reputation as a hauler becomes more 'certified/reputable'. If they outgrow the org they can branch out to bigger things if they wish to.

I always said the low hanging tech would come earlier than the meaty stuff. The Hangars and Freight Elevators were always going to be transformative. I predict were going to get tier 0 of the hangars and elevators about 3 weeks to a month after the base 3.23 patch and a couple of hot-fixes.

I dont see us using the C2 to make 30 small runs to outposts to pick up a few SCU at a time. It could be expensive to maintain and fuel and staff a ship that size. I see us using the freelancer and such to go out and gather that stuff and bring it to the C2. Or just deal in bulk

It was always going to be a point patch release, and even then, NOT just a single point patch either. The changes required were just too big, and too broadly across the board, affecting or being affected by other systems in the game. Basically they wanted to avoid another 3.18 "Moment"

i work in a distribution center. it makes perfect sense. a distribution center does alot more than you think with consolidating, breaking packages down ect. they are absolutely necessary. the space stations are like your ports which dont deal with consolidating smaller packages. the size of these places are irrelevant. Just because ships can quantum jump is again based on costs and efficiency. you can load up a big cargo plane and fly it to a destination in 1/10 of the time but its not as efficient

Regarding the trade routes. I think you may can see it this way. The LEO and other stations work solely on a stellar system scale. When we have more systems in the game, it even becomes bigger. This means that the LEO's doesn't have the capacity to repackage that large amount of cargo to smaller stations. Instead it just reshuffles the 32/24 SCU containers to different DC's or directly to the cities, that then work on a planetary scale. This is also why we would have different DC's around the planet. Because they work in different regions of the planetary system. From here, stuff is distributed to larger or smaller stations, including on the moons, where the final scale is individual packages ie. the FedEx driver in SC.

They could delay the patch and simply release Theatres of War instead, but that would actually require CIG to not have lied about Theatres of War existing in the first place all those years ago. That would keep us occupied while they polish the supposedly existant content we've been deprived of in this now supposedly 'gutted' 3.23(5.3) patch.

My head cannon for cargo lanes and how DCs fit in is this: Villages/Bases/outposts = irl residential doorstep. Starter/small cargo ships (and possibly even ground vehicles🤞 depending on distance, weather, terrain and road access) deliver small quantities of specific goods. Planetary landing pads = distribution centers for said doorsteps. Medium cargo ships deliver medium quantities of various goods from the new larger DCs. New DCs & major landing zones = distribution centers for the regional planetary landing pads. Large vessels capable of planetary landing travel between DCs and in-system space stations Space stations = irl ports. Largest vessels travel to and from other stations and systems I don't personally see the new DCs as illogical or redundant even though they are essentially DCs for DCs. Not only will they likely be responsible for fabricating some goods of their own considering their corporate ownership, but also in a world of this scale it seems natural to have to add another stop. Not only does this give every sized cargo ship a role to play, but it would also help to more efficiently organize incoming and outgoing goods. All that said, I don't think ships of certain sizes should/will be limited to these specific roles, I just think this is how they will be operated most efficiently.

From my understanding, distribution centers are owned by a faction. So they're either a collection center for nearby resource extraction/manufacturing to then send into the larger trade ecosystem, or where they pull resources from the larger trade ecosystem and then distribute it among their nearby faction outposts. Like most companies are going to have their own warehouses to track and store their products and aren't going to rely entirely on renting space in the dockyard of an international trade port. Also, I'm not sure the LEOs could handle the volume of all the last mile transactions for a single planet by themselves. Even if one ship can quickly go from station to final destination planetside, the station can't necessarily handle hundreds of simultaneous ships arriving and departing. It can, however handle a few large ships that break that load up into more locations that can in turn support more trading across all of them simultaneously. Maybe that'd just mean more LEO stations around a planet, but it's not unreasonable that a huge planetside instillation would be cheaper to build and maintain than an equally huge orbital instillation.

man the cargo elevators and missions were the thing i was really looking forward to