TL;DRMedium was chosen as the sweet spot because the ship was too big for small but large would need more crew, turrets and components, while medium offers much more usable space than the Cutlass.
So, yeah, medium is basically... there's medium-large. Basically, once we started looking at what we wanted with the Apollo, which is having several patients and doing this kind of stuff over a large distance, we thought, well, it's too big to be a small ship. And the issue is that even if the Endeavor is massive, like bigger than large, large was too big for what we wanted to do. So medium was basically the sweet spot, even if it's close to some ships that are a bit too small, or some ships that are a bit too close to large. So it's a bit tight, but it's the sweet spot basically to do what we wanted to do, which, well, we will talk about it, and we've seen that in Ship Shape and other stuff. But yeah, the sweet spot on a medium ship is basically going around, but without needing a lot of people with you to do this kind of stuff.
The larger you get, the more extra stuff you have to factor in. They start becoming big targets. So you either need to start throwing turrets all over the place on them, which then, if they're manned turrets, you need spaces for people to be in those manned turrets, you need spaces to get to them. Or you start sort of almost needing larger components to provide that defense, which then just makes it a bigger ship, at which point you're back to being a large one. So medium just fits that goal nicely. And if you compare it to the Cutlass, they're the same sort of width if you factor in the Cutlass's engines, which sort of artificially bloat it, but it is a fair length longer because of the shape of it. Whilst on paper it doesn't seem that much bigger than the Cutlass, there is a lot more usable space in it.
TL;DRThe ship is slightly longer than a Cutlass with similar width and two separate rear cargo rooms, comparable speed to the Freelancer, a remote turret, modular medical beds, and a more armored but slower Medivac variant.
So in terms of stats, like John said, it's basically a bit longer than a Cutlass, but about the same width. So it's 43 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 10 meters high. It has 28 SCU. The thing is that it's separated into two rooms at the back; it's not one big room. You've got two entrances: basically you've got a small lift, like at the front of the Constellation, which is basically for the crew, and at the rear you've got a big ramp, which also allows it to work as a big docking collar, if you want. Outside of that, in terms of speed, it's relatively a bit like the Freelancer, if I remember well, which is 205 meters per second for the base variant and 195 meters per second for the Medivac variant. The thing that is different between the speeds is that, as people might see later on, or have already seen, the Medivac variant is better armored, but basically it's a bit slower and not as maneuverable. You're trading that.
In terms of weapons, it's relatively simple. It's one remote turret on the top with two size 2 cannons. Well, it's two size 2 laser cannons for the regular variant and two size 2 miniguns, ballistic miniguns, Gatlings, for the Medivac. Outside of that, in terms of thruster placement, it's relatively the usual. The Medivac variant has heavy armor, the regular has medium armor, two shield generators. It has a large radar, which is different from the usual, because obviously you will need to scan space to find bodies and other injured people. I've seen that some people might be interested in the number of toilets, so there's two toilets in the ship. There's two ejection beds as well. It's basically like on the Constellation: it's ejection pods that also act like beds. So it's pretty good.
I think the really interesting thing about this is the two rooms where the medical beds are; they're going to be modular. So you can swap them out depending on what level of medical gameplay you want to do. And alongside the pages later today, there is actually going to be an updated design post that talks about medical gameplay, because we haven't really talked about it since the Death of a Spaceman post. So it's sort of like a short update post to that.
TL;DRThe two mirrored med bay rooms are swappable modules with three bed tiers, from many general-injury beds to large single-patient surgery rooms, and can be mixed and matched per side.
Yeah, so you can see that they're essentially mirror images of each other. So when I say med bays, I'm talking about them both at the same time. Part of the medical gameplay post talks about different levels of injury and healing, and different equipment can do different levels of things. So an abandoned moon that might have this old ancient medical facility might only be able to do certain levels of healing. Like it might be able to stop some bleeding, patch you up enough to get you somewhere properly. It's not going to be able to replace a ruined limb or multiple injuries. And that's something we want to do with the Apollo. So in, I think, that shot, there's three beds on every side. So these are three of the sort of... I can't remember which way the numbering went in the design post... I think tier three beds.
JH
Jared HuckabyHost, Content Manager for Global Video Production
Tier three is recovering from minor injuries, like limbs being damaged. Tier one is recovering from near-death experiences and fatal injuries. So tier one is the more severe.
Yeah. So these are essentially tier three medical beds. So you've got six medical beds that can heal a variety of just general injuries that you'd expect people to find. If you want to be a bit more serious, you can swap those rooms out for some tier two rooms, which only have two beds on each side, but they're bigger beds, they can do more. And then if you really want to be full doctor, full surgeon, you swap them out for tier one rooms. And those are your big isolation rooms, big surgery rooms that can do the whole thing that you would find in, like, Hurston's big planetary medical facilities, but in a small ship. But you can only do one at a time in those beds. You can mix and match, so you could have one tier one on one side and a tier three on the other, so you can provide some flexibility, and it sort of allows you to tailor how you want to play that. But it's all about just letting you...
It will be interesting to see what the players are going with in terms of configuration, like if players really want to be basic three on three or two on one.
TL;DRIn 3.2 medical gameplay is basic, using a MediPen or dying, while the plans are permanent injuries and more depth as described in Death of a Spaceman, which is still mostly accurate.
Yes, 3.2 right now is fairly easy. Obviously, it evolved a bit over time; it's not what we had a long time ago. But right now, it's basically: you get injuries or you get bleeding or whatever, and you use your MediPen or you die, basically. So that's it. We have some stuff that is already in the code, like planned for it, like for injuring limbs and stuff like this. But it's not where we want to go yet. Basically we have this plan, but obviously it's not there yet. And the thing is that what we want to do is some kind of permanent injuries, like in Death of a Spaceman.
As we were reading through that during this post, there was quite a lot of it that is still completely accurate today, even though it was written four years ago, five years ago. It's still exactly what we plan to do. So in our heads, we had, oh, we need to do this huge design post about how much has changed. And actually, there isn't a huge amount that's changed. The design post talks about what Corentin said, how it is now, how we want to go in the future, so this more persistent damage, how people are going to be dealing with respawning from death and other sort of injuries, what side effects that has, why you choose to respawn at a medical ship versus going somewhere else, just things like that. When that was written, there wasn't a huge amount in game to sort of get your mind wrapped around, whereas now there is significantly more. So there's a lot more questions that have come up since then. It's not a huge, full, in-depth article like Death of a Spaceman 2.0. It's more like an appendix.
TL;DRThe ship's two drones are used only to rescue injured people, enclosing them in a protective field and delivering them to the beds, and they double as stretchers that can be pushed through the airlock.
At a functional level, drones are drones are drones. They can be controlled remotely or they can be semi-autonomous. But these ones are specifically designed for... I was going to say capturing, but that's probably an aggressive tone... for rescuing injured people, particularly in space where they're just floating around. So they can be sent out; they come out of the bottom of the ship and encase the person in this sort of protective field. Because obviously in space you might be in a cracked suit; you probably don't want to just be left in the void until you get back in the ship, so it sort of encases them. It goes back in the ship, and it's quite a neat system. I don't think we really showed it in any detail, but they go in the bottom of the ship and they sort of get filtered to the underside of the beds, and the drone attaches onto the other side of the beds, and they come up through the beds, and the beds all sort of open up to take them. Then the drone goes back down and leaves them on the bed. So it sort of makes a nice seal to put them in this sort of healing bed, and then they can go off and do it again. Obviously, if you've got six beds, you can fill it up with six people. You only get two drones with it, and they are just for that. It's not like the Vulcan's drones that you can repurpose into doing other things. They are purely for capturing and rescuing bodies. You can't use them to go up to another ship and rescue the missiles off them. And they are sort of the stretcher in the same way. So if they're not being semi-autonomous... unless I'm just speaking nonsense now, they are one and the same.
One of the reasons that we put a big hump at the back with a big airlock is, if needed, if the drone can't be used properly, you just push it and go in.
TL;DRIt definitely won't fit in the Polaris, but it's intended to fit in the Endeavor's hangar, at least one and maybe not two, and a docking collar lets it get close to big ships.
Definitely not the Polaris. We were looking at what we'd said on record about the Polaris all those years ago and found this really nice fan-created image where they had extrapolated the landing pad size out of the holoviewer model and then taken all our ships in-game. And the old Cutlass couldn't fit on there, so the new Cutlass definitely won't fit on there, which means the Apollo won't fit on there. We were talking about the Endeavor. Obviously, the Endeavor is not being built at the moment, so we're quite flexible in what we can do with that. So we fully intend for it to fit in the hangar module there. I know way back in the day when we talked about it, it was said to hold two Cutlasses, I believe. I don't know whether it will still take two Cutlasses; the Cutlass has got bigger since then. But if it holds one Cutlass, it will definitely hold one Apollo. Maybe not two, because it's going to start getting very long. It might look a bit odd.
Something that we will look at when it comes to the Endeavor... We were about to check the Idris before we came on here. The thing is that it's supposed to have a docking collar anyway, so it will be able to get close to some other big ships that won't be able to have it inside anyway. It's not a small ship that you try the usual 'can it fit?' with, because it's a big ship; it's 40 meters long and 10 meters tall. Basically, the biggest issues are it's really long, and it's pretty tall as well.
TL;DRThe Cutlass Red is a smaller, faster, armed one-bed combat ambulance, the Apollo a small clinic and the Endeavor a big hospital; all three are meant to be complementary, and the Cutlass Red's production was pushed back to settle this.
So basically, there's two things about that. Obviously, the Cutlass Red, the last time we talked about it, was when it was way smaller. Now it's way bigger. But the intention stays the same, which is that it only has one bed inside. So it's not something where you can take a lot of patients. It's something where you get on the scene, you get someone. You can either go somewhere to a hospital, for example, or to an Apollo, to an Endeavor, this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's a bit complicated with that. And the other thing is that the Cutlass Red obviously is based on the Cutlass, which is a pretty big fighter now, a medium fighter. So while it won't be as powerful as the Cutlass Black, because, well, it's not a fighter...
It will still be more powerful. I'd say it's a bit more like you go into a hot zone with the Cutlass rather than going there with an Apollo. Obviously, the Medivac variant of the Apollo is pretty good, but it's more: you've got an emergency, you need to go there, you need to escape quickly.
Yeah, the sort of methodology we use internally is the Cutlass Red is your ambulance, or sort of your combat ambulance. It's very small scale, but it's faster, it's got the armament. The Apollo is like a little doctor's clinic where it can treat a small amount of things, and the Endeavor is your big city hospital. And all three are completely valid. Not everyone wants to have the big hospital. Not everyone wants to have just an ambulance. Some people want all three. That's fine. They all work together in the same career, and you can go up and down the chain as you please, because if you want to just jump in and just ferry one injured person around at a time, the Apollo is sort of overkill for that, whereas you might get a medical mission where you've got 400 people to transfer within a time limit. You could probably do that in your Cutlass Red, but you're going to have to be going fast and not make a mistake or not get interdicted during that time.
The Cutlass Red was actually due to go into production around the time we were starting this process. And we pushed it back because of this ship, because we wanted to solve a lot of the unanswered questions with medical gameplay that we just hadn't really thought about. And rather than just start the Cutlass Red and sort of put ourselves into a corner, we pushed that back. It's still some months away before we start doing it. We got our ducks in a row with this, and then we can work out where does the Cutlass Red fit against this? Where does the Apollo fit against that? And make sure that they're both complementary to each other, not that one just blasts the other one out of the water.
TL;DRThe slanted glass and side struts keep the RSI look while keeping struts out of view when the player turns their head to aim, avoiding the visibility problems seen on other ships.
We had a bit of a debate, not a long debate, but obviously when we look at the Constellation, there are some struts. When we look at the Apollo, it's a different kind of ship, and you need to look: oh, there's a body there, a body there, a body there. And it's something that personally I wanted to push on. Paul managed as well to keep the RSI style with the struts on the side, and it's a bit different. The main issue that we've seen, for example recently with the Cutlass or with the Razor before, is that obviously it's always a bit of a pain if you use your head to aim and you've got a big strut in front of you and you can't see shit. So yeah, that's something that works really well as well with the slanted glass. So it's still really RSI if you look from the side at the struts, but in a way that if you turn your head, yes, there are some struts, but they're not in your view. It just works well.
Armor, maneuverability. There's some missiles. Oh, yeah. There's two, say, three missile launchers. So obviously, it comes with two size two missiles on each. But yeah, I've seen people wondering why there are missiles on a medical ship. But yeah, it ties pretty well with when we were making the variant. It works well as well with the minigame and other stuff. It's not like it's overpowered or whatever. It's not like you will start taking down all the ships coming at you with your medical ship. It just works well.
JH
Jared HuckabyHost, Content Manager for Global Video Production
And RSI has got a bit of a standing history with these projectile weapons, between the torpedoes on the Polaris and the missile racks on the Constellations.
I'm not sure if... The question is probably, can you do a scam where you get someone, hit him, and say, now you must pay, even if I shot your leg before? That sounds like... yeah, that's a bit sandboxy, so who knows?
Yeah, I would expect for players to put people in these drones, they're going to have to be unconscious or knocked down. I'm not suggesting how you get them into that state to start with, but you're not just going to be poaching people running around space stations with them.
So we have a simple system for that. The thing is that we take basically two tanks. So two tanks is the amount of SCU for the cargo variant, so the C2 has 624 SCU, the M2 has 468 SCU, and the A2 is basically one half of this, so it's 234 SCU.
So it goes from two, which is basically like on the Starfarer or any cargo ship, which is pilot, copilot, to three for the M2, which is basically another seat in the cockpit. And then we get into the A2, which is a lot, where it's eight seats total. And then you add one other guy for the bomb bay at the rear, which is pretty cool. There's a station in between the bombs at the back, so it's a cool visual. But obviously some players might want to solo it, and technically they can play it solo, but don't expect to fire any guns outside of the main guns if you're just alone.
Yes. So that's the thing that we wanted from the start, is that the Starlifter was built for two tanks. It was the main design point. And when we went on to making the gunship variant, it was like, oh, well, that takes a lot of place, but it's still a Hercules, it must fit a tank inside. So there's always space for a tank at the front, unless you fit some cargo or some Cyclones or whatever at the front.
You need to go from the front. The back is entirely just for the bomb system. Maybe Paul can explain the choice for the two doors and stuff like this, but it's easier, obviously, in terms of design. You can enter from one point or another, but also if you decide to put some cargo at the rear, for example, for a regular variant, obviously, well, you can't enter your vehicle from the rear and just push the cargo to the front or whatever. It just makes sense.
It's the sort of roll-on, roll-off kind of theory, isn't it? It's like the ferry. For once, we're trying to make it easy. You load up your tanks, go in and quickly sort of offload basically. That was the thinking originally, try and make it make sense for once. We're doing better, a lot better these days.
So technically, anything smaller than a tank can fit inside. So that's a good thing about the tank, is that it's massive. So you can put many different ships inside. So we made some small list about what could fit relatively easily. Well, easily, I've seen people put ships in ships that shouldn't fit, but they fit. So technically, obviously all the ground vehicles, you can put an Argo, a P-52, Razor, 85X, M50, and technically the Aurora series as well, if you're good. It's a bit longer, but it should fit. So basically every ship that is relatively small, you can fit in. If it gets a bit bigger, like with wings, it might get a bit tough because it's mostly, well, getting through the doors.
Yeah, so basically it's a bit like the difference between the Starfarer and the Starfarer Gemini. The civilian variant of the Starlifter is medium armor, but the other ones, military and gunship, are heavy armor. So you will feel the difference. It has more guns, but also more armor. So it's not just like one more gun and a bit less cargo. It's a ship for, well, if you have some ships attacking you, you will still be able to defend yourself longer than a civilian variant.
TL;DREach variant has two fixed size 4 ballistic cannons plus size 3 remote turrets at the rear and bottom; the military adds a nose turret and the gunship adds Gatlings, side cannons and bombs.
Well, there's a lot of weapons. So let's start from the easy one, from the civilian variant. Each variant basically has two size 4 fixed ballistic cannons at the front, basically just a bit behind the cockpit. They are deployable guns. Then you got size 3 guns on two remote turrets, one covering the rear of the ship, which is pretty good, and one that is at the bottom of the ship. So even if you land the ship, technically, you will still have quite a good view because the cargo bay is pretty high up. So the feet are pretty high up as well. So even if you deploy the ramps as well, both ramps at the same time, you can cover a big range around it. For the military variant, it's easy. Basically, you add a remote turret, same size, size 3 guns, under the nose. So it's more power at the front. On the gunship, well, it's where it becomes a bit complicated. Same thing as the military variant, but on top of that, you add two size 4 ballistic Gatlings, which are on the side towards the front, and two size 5 remote side ballistic cannons, which are basically the same thing on the side, but a bit further behind. And obviously, you've got the bomb system, and you got either four size 10 bombs, which are really big. I think there has been a picture of Paul looking at his screen. It's a nice concept art of those bombs. And we got what was made for cluster bombing as well, which is about 60 size 3 bombs. So there's a big size difference, but there's a big number difference as well. So it's quite a bit.