Love it, love it, love it. Better every single time, without exception.
1. Ice: hey, I like it exactly as it is.
2. Boost capacitor: I'm not too sure about this one yet. No worries when you're flitting about in a dense asteroid field where you don't need to travel quickly for any distance... but what about when you want to travel between more distant points within a system? Being able to research capacitors that hold more "charge" could help, but they still impose a limit on quick in-system travel, don't they? This is mostly a question from a kind of "get the big picture" exploration perspective.
3. Mining: definitely seeing the potential here. I will say I'm still not sure about the transfer beam approach, but I'm not in a position to be critical because I don't have a more constructive approach to suggest.
I will say that it occurs to me that this feels similar to planet scanning/mining in Mass Effect 2, with the difference that the surveying/mining actions are reversed. In
Mass Effect 2's mining, you run a beam across the surface of the object to identify high-frequency target locations, then when you find one you fire a "probe" to that location and it magically adds materials to your notional cargo hold.
I honestly found this pretty boring in ME2; as I've said, I literally dozed off more than once while scanning. I don't know that the same thing would happen during the process of hoovering up ore in LT, especially since this (as mentioned in today's video) has more active gameplay elements than in ME2 -- presumably there'll often be other miners around, and perhaps Evil Pirates as well, so nodding off is probably unwise.
The "play a beam across an object for X amount of time" mechanic is similar, though. So I... need to think about this one some more as well.
4. The new frequency-scanner: oh, yes.
This is so, so close to what I imagined in my proposal for sensor ops in Star Trek Online back in the Long-Ago Time!
This already shows what the basic functionality can do. There are plenty of enhancements possible, and I hope we can start exchanging ideas about those soon (I have a few in mind). But yes -- nailed it!
5. "Macro-level stuff": You know I'm looking forward to this, too.
In addition to AI, I'm very interested in seeing how the personal, tactical-level play actions will scale up to multi-sector gameplay, both in terms of our interface to the game and how we can interact with large groups of NPCs.
Definitely future-stuff, but it was nice to hear it mentioned.
6. Gameplay: I also thought the comments about this at the end of the video were absolutely on target. They're exactly what the gamers who enjoy digging into mechanics-as-play want to hear, and they do a bang-up job of ending the video leaving people wanting more.
All in all, another outstanding month's work on display. Thank you, Josh!