 Space legs, but why? The one thing you hear consistently fired at Frontier whenever they appear on a live stream is space legs. The ability to get out of the pilot's chair and float or walkabout rather than being constantly confined to your ship or SRV has been demanded by certain quarters in the Elite Dangerous community almost since day one of the game and to be fair to those voices it's one of those stated goals of Elite Dangerous's ongoing development and indeed has been since before the game's release. Whether you're in the I don't want space legs camp or the oh hell yes camp on the subject there is one question that comes up over and over of all things Elite Feet and that is if you could get out of the chair what would you do? I'm going to try and at least speculate on an answer to that question now. Let's get one thing out of the way from the off not everyone enjoys first person games some people just want the cockpit experience and are quite happy with that Frontier know this and will also know that it's important to serve those players equally as well as the must have crowd and I'll touch on some ideas for the cockpit players as well as the SRV aficionado in this piece. It's almost certain then that the introduction of space legs would not and honestly should not detract from the existing experience and if we assume for a moment that space legs are part of the 2020 paid expansion then it's also reasonable to assume that as well as space legs there will be content in that expansion that will serve the cockpit jockies as well without the requirement to get out of the chair. So with all that said what could space legs bring to the game? There's three sides to the space legs equation inside your ship outside your ship but still in space and outside your ship but on a planet or installation let's deal with inside your ship first. As cool as getting up and having a look at what is behind the door at the back of the cockpit would be that novelty would only likely last a day once you'd explored all the ships you're going to need some other reason beyond sightseeing to wonder about inside your ship. You could argue that manually loading cargo could be a thing space legs would enable but let's be honest it happens mysteriously and instantaneously at the moment 700 tons of bio waste sounds like a lot of work to handle manually and I'd be just fine if that carried on having mysteriously and instantaneously in the background. But how about if rare commodities could only be loaded manually? You can currently only ever buy a small load of those at a time and if trading in those goods moved away from the main commodity market and instead to a more specialist and more labour intensive purchasing and loading method that could be a great way to further restrict the availability of the goods in a believable way you could literally carry the most precious and delicate of cargo into the hold yourself and place it in a specialized slot. When the Horizons expansion launched it brought with it the engineers who are only reachable on planetary surfaces locking a desirable game altering system behind an expansion is something frontier have done before and it's therefore reasonable to assume that it's something they might do again. So what if a new path in engineering was made available to you with the advent of space legs but it's something that you had to get involved in personally and engineer yourself literally using tools and raw materials to retrofit new components to your existing modules hand welding them in place maybe technology so volatile and dangerous that even the engineers won't attempt it currently none of the anti-thargoid weapons or systems are engineerable so this could potentially be a path that you could explore but only using a legs expansion you might have to find some hidden dubious engineer on some far flung outpost corner him or her personally. Negotiate or bribe for the needed parts and then fit them yourself in your ship out of the view of the authorities while we're on the subject of interacting with your ship on a mechanical level then let's talk about damage control and repair we already know that frontier have internally at least talked about this very thing already the elite dangerous digital art book contains concept images that show commanders moving through damaged vessels and even repairing exterior damage on the ship in the same image you can even see a commander approaching using thrusters on their hands and feet like a 34th century iron man it's worth noting this point by the way as an aside the anaconda is the only ship in the game that currently shows off any kind of actual damage modeling for a system like this to be implemented it would need to be replicated on every single ship in the game and then on every single new ship added after so outside the ship is for me where the space legs concept really starts to open up as we mentioned previously there's concept art that shows a commander moving away from their ship using iron man like thrusters imagine doing that but in an asteroid field or a planetary ring system perhaps your commander could harvest very specific new materials or commodities from the rocks that are just too fine and delicate to be handled by core or laser mining techniques then of course there's piracy and boarding a ship that opens up two levels of gameplay the attacker and the victim if your ship is disabled in normal space then you could find yourself in a race to repair the damage internally before having to down tools and repel borders as enemy commanders or AI pirates try to make their way onto your ship to not only steal your cargo but perhaps your entire vessel and while we're talking about boarding have you ever visited one of the many generation ships lost and drifting in the void if you access the recorded logs on the outside of each vessel each one has a fascinating and in some cases terrifying story to be told but imagine being able to further explore the history of these vessels via what's inside them hack or cut your way into the ships and then move through them compartment by compartment room by room collecting valuable data artifacts materials or just personal effects to flesh out more of the story and add color to the many lives lost in their decades-long journeys or even deal with whatever killed them in the first place or you could board the generation ships in pursuit of grave robbers in the hope that you and your team can preserve what has essentially become a drifting memorial. So how about planetary surfaces there's a myriad of surface installations in elite personally I want to explore and pillage them also I'm hoping the inhabitants don't want me doing that and try to stop me but there could also be special mission contacts in the installations or even just social spaces to see other commanders a lot of these types of features could also be added to the existing space station interiors as well I can absolutely imagine a backwater Coriolis starport having a CD back room area dealing in illegal or dubious technology and then of course there are the Thargoids and the Guardians both have surface sites you could be an interstellar Indiana Jones raiding long abandoned Guardian sites for archaeological finds or advanced technology when it comes to raiding Thargoid sites remember that scene from the movie aliens where the Marines first go into the hive the let's rock scene that please thanks or how about the outpost on planet P scene in Starship troopers would we finally have an actual drop ship use for the drop ship you know and have it I don't know drop shipping whilst obviously not for everybody for me there are a myriad of uses and exciting gameplay opportunities for space legs in the framework of the existing game and I do feel that if you personally don't want to leave the chair then there are still gameplay and immersion expanding opportunities with space legs in the mix for the cockpit jockey to enjoy that drop ship will still need a red hot pilot and those ground troops could I'm sure really use some close air support on hand when things get sticky or indeed caustic the space legs conversation always ends up speculating on talk of legs and feet but for me any first-person element is intrinsically linked to SRVs as well so what about space wheels any space legs expansion is going to include a planetary surface gameplay element and with it surely will finally see an expansion to the SRV experience anytime mankind goes anywhere new we generally take wheeled vehicles with us we even took one to the moon the SRV gameplay hasn't been expanded on since the launch of the horizons expansion and we know for a fact from public job postings on the internet that frontier is looking to recruit ground vehicle AI specialists for something they're not yet talking about could we see tanks and other types of armored vehicles on the ground engaging in combat becoming a thing in elite the game already has a drop ship that can't drop anyone or anything and a gunship that can't effectively act as a gunship currently these two ships alone aren't doing in the game what their names suggest they should be doing Wikipedia's definition of a gunship is quote a military aircraft armed with heavy guns primarily intended for attacking ground targets unquote and if you look up drop ship it redirects you to shuttlecraft and describes quote a smaller vessel that is launched from a mothership and has the ability to transport people or cargo between ships or to and from a planet surface without being damaged or destroyed unquote I'd love to have a go at that personally but I make no promises about the damaged or destroyed bit if a first person shooter style element is to be added to what is essentially a cockpit simulator right now then it also makes sense to me to have the cockpit and the first person game be separate but joined entities where CQC was a standalone fighter component to the main game a first-person shooter standalone component where FPS ground troops join the game and play alongside those that wish to stay cockpit bound is something that has been experimented with in games like Eve a standalone first-person shooter expansion that dovetails with the existing galaxy of ships and SRVs would be a nice gateway drug into the universe of elite but that might be a pipe dream too far overall space legs as a proposition is such a massive undertaking that underlying infrastructure and graphical improvements are likely to be seen across the entire game touching almost every aspect of what is already there indeed an entire code base revamp has been rumored as the game is aged somewhat by modern standards now frontier has a history and I would suggest perhaps a policy of releasing an update and then iterating and adding to the content in that update my point being whatever is released in 2020 is likely not where the expansion will end but what are your hopes for space legs do you believe they're part of the 2020 update do you even care about space legs and if not what would you like to see and if you do care about space legs what would you like to see done with them let us know in the comments below thanks very much for watching and remember to subscribe to the channel and click the little bell icon to stay updated