I'm sure lots of people are excited at the prospect of standing up a base and doing fun base things. Have fun basing your base. I'm struggling to digest it - because it feels premature. It's a new thing - it generates lots of concept art and presentation material and screen time for ISC and SCL - but shouldn't it come after the thing that really brought us here? In 2012, the big revelation was the seamless transition between player and ship, walking across a cap ship hangar and climbing up into the cockpit of your fighter. The vision of the game quickly progressed and ships were always central - particularly ships with interiors, which were a big part of the lure. The initial clunky Freelancer cockpit with the window bars (I loved that, people would have an aneurysm about it today though) - the Cutlass with the open toilet next to the bed - the tiny Avenger etc. A ship was the ticket to adventure, with some offering space for crew - beds to log out in - living spaces - kitchens to support the crew on their distant voyages - the imaginative 'shoilet' for hygiene and decontamination - places to hang your gear - things to maintain - voyages to be had. I thought the ship WAS the base. What strikes me over the last few years is the complete lack of progress in this area. Sure, the artwork of the ships has improved considerably, as has functional design, but not the habitability or the sense that these are enduring vessels that carry us on adventures in the stars. In spite of the Carrack demo 5 years ago showing us working suit lockers, they still don't work today - not even invoking the ship inventory system when you interact. From a multicrew perspective, we've arguably gone backwards; where once we could venture out together and all bed-log in and out, now we have a sterile environment that flat out rejects the presence of others, only allowing a ship owner to log out, and only then when nobody else is in the proximity. Copilots can only copilot on one ship (Zeus), and by the issues we saw, I'm not convinced that wasn't by accident and certainly isn't in a great state. Somewhere on the horizon, something something fuses. Kitchens are still elaborate props where you can't even get a glass of water ... in year 13 ... let alone food. Maybe I wouldn't mind, but for the fact that CIG see fit to dehydrate players every 3 hours. You get the point - it's been the same for an age now. Nothing changes in terms of making these things function as bases - and I think the recent miserly fuel economy changes are just compounding the sense that these are for A to B transport only. They're not a base, even if they have all the visual trappings of one. So when I hear about base building as the new hotness. it makes me wonder if ships were never intended to be your Millenium Falcon - or your Serenity - or your Normandy - or even your Nostromo. They're more like a Honda, or a Datsun or maybe a Volvo. Am I mistaken? Have CIG abandoned quite a special thing found in the lore of so many Sci-Fi stories and moved on to the new hotness, perhaps not recognising the value that some players hold for the notion of a base amongst the stars?