A closer look at the slide in the recent direct that breaks down all ship parts that can be used to construct a spaceship.
I think most of them are self-explanatory, but I wonder what the distinction between grav drives, engines, and reactors is, and what exactly fuel tanks affect.
I also wonder how cargo capacity manifests, and if there's cargo that we can't carry on our person but only on our ships. It would be a bit silly if we could carry tons of ore in our spacesuits to our ship, so having some way to transfer directly from outpost resource collectors to our ships would make sense to me.
Having prior experience with space sims, I'm guessing your grav drives are responsible for how far you can "jump" across the galaxy, like a hyperspace jump (perhaps it could also affect cooldown period between jumps).
Your Engines affects your acceleration, maneuverability, and max speed in normal space.
And reactor is the total power available to your ship. In most space simulators you have to carefully balance power to either weapons, shields, engines, and possibly more systems. You will never be able to juice up all systems 100% simultaneously so you need to manage the power flow in real-time. Just got ambushed and you need to make a quick getaway? Full power to engines and grav drive (maybe a bit in shields) - but NO power to weapons cause you need to spend your limited energy to escape. On the other hand, you're on a mission to take down an enemy ship and are on the offensive? Full power to weapons and some into engines for speed/maneuverability, and hopefully you can blast the enemy to smithereens before he escapes.
Yeah, they go over their power management in the video: https://youtu.be/H26Dtgbsfzw?t=1547
It looks a lot more complex than the three category system most space sims use (shields, engines, weapons) which is kind of interesting. I am sure that you can max everything out if you oversize your reactor and than don't have that many weapons. I'm hoping that they have some sort of way to get a legendary reactor or something as a quest reward, or as something you can research and develop. Balancing this kind of thing seems like a nightmare - ED is very bad about it and treats it as a way to introduce grind into their game.