Geoffrey Coffin

So the exterior of the Idris is mostly there, which is why we're going to be putting it into the PU soon. A lot of the damage is set up for it, the exterior artwork, all the thrusters, et cetera, which is why that can happen. But the interior is still fairly work in progress, because in Squadron 42 it's very much a work in progress there still. Any reworks that go in, any changes to the PCap or anything, need to be updated within the Idris. The interior is still very much in flux. And in addition to all that as well, it's a big multi-crew ship. So as these features get implemented, we need to obviously refine what's present inside the ship. So currently as it stands, the ship interior isn't in a state where we can give it to the public, and it probably won't be for a while.

One person can technically fly it around like a fighter, but you will be getting barely any of the ship's functionality out of it. I mean, your pilot will be able to fly the ship, but you're supposed to have a navigator who will be navigating where you're going to go to and helping you avoid or go to hotspots. You'll have people manning the air traffic control seats, who, if you want to have any ships take off and fly away, or even new ones flying in, you'll need to have someone to manage all that. The pilot can't do all of this on their own. You'll have weapon seats to handle the railgun at the front. Even a captain who, if someone's being belligerent in the crew, might be able to turn around and demote someone on the fly and say, no, you can't do that anymore. So there's a lot of this functionality that is going to be going into the ship, or should be going into the ship, but it's just not there yet. We don't have it ready yet. So essentially what you would have if you were to release the Idris right now is a giant fighter, and I don't think most people would appreciate that.

It was really tricky. So initially, before the mission took too much shape, one of the first things that came my way was to actually try to balance the Idris around fighting different amounts of ships. So I'd start spawning Hammerhead after Hammerhead after Hammerhead and just having tons of Hammerheads fighting the ship. And then I'd try out maybe throwing in some Retaliators with their torpedoes. One of the first things we quickly discovered was, with the way the ships are currently set up, they've got a small health pool on multiple parts of the ship. And as you take damage, it'll spread up the ship and eventually go to the core location and then kill the ship. What happened with one size nine torpedo is the splash damage would hit so many locations that one would just kill the Idris straight away. So we were immediately like, right, we need to give this thing a bigger centralized health pool and then have the other areas have slightly less, just to balance it out. So there was a lot of iteration just on the health of the ship alone, let alone tweaking the shield generators, because there's things like capital size shield generators, like the 890 has, which make it huge and very difficult to damage in the first place. So there was a lot of base iteration, just making this thing resilient enough to actually require a bunch of people to kill, but not be completely unkillable in the first place.