TL;DRThe Ironclad is for players who want to haul lots of cargo in a fairly durable, well-armed Drake ship, and the developers describe changes to traversal, signage and deck differentiation to help players orient themselves.
To be blunt, it's for someone who wants to do a lot of cargo. They want a ship that's relatively durable, and they like Drakes that have lots of guns. Because Drake ostensibly market this as a cargo manufacturer, but we all know what Drake tends to get up to, so sometimes the cargo's not as legit as it should be, or maybe the cargo is cargo you've got to deliver pain to other people. But yeah, it sort of caters to that. And externally, at least, I think it's pretty true to the concept. We did make some changes to it. Dan begged for an extra entrance into the top of it.
Yeah, traversal was such a massive thing for this ship versus the concept, I remember. And with the signage as well, I remember when we worked on the Polaris, one of the key pieces of feedback was that the signage wasn't as good as it could be. And obviously we went back and edited that a bit, but with this ship...
Yeah, the stairs have flipped. I believe the elevator was added as well. When we actually got it in and started running around it, once we actually started putting the blockout together, we made a few changes just so it felt a bit more natural, because there was a lot of back and forth and hard 90 and hard 180 degrees that people were having to do as they were walking around. So we softened a lot of the corners, put 45s in. Like here, the wall got knocked in so this became an open area, which I think really helped differentiate the different decks, which is obviously something that we tried really hard to do. You should always know roughly where you are, and when you're in a modular kit, because this is one of the most modular ships we've ever made...
Yeah, so when we talk about developer modularity, what we mean is the asset pack that you use to author the vehicles. So let's say you have a wall that's two meters long. It doesn't make sense to model every single wall two times, in the same way that if you were to make a car, you wouldn't 3D model every single wheel again. You'd want to duplicate it. So we have this base layer of modularity of our assets underneath, and then we sit on top of that these extra assets that make each of the spaces feel different. And it was really important for us to make it so no matter where you were stood in the ship, you didn't feel lost and you were able to quickly orient yourself. I get the first time you're in it, it's a big ship, you're not going to know exactly where you're going, but it shouldn't take long to establish that.
A sense of exploration though, isn't it? The first time you enter a ship, you want to explore it. You don't necessarily just want to be like, I go in it and I know exactly what's going on. So I think that's part of the charm of these bigger ships, that you do need to explore them a little bit. Obviously, like you say, having navigation is an important user experience thing that we need to try and improve. Obviously, we've got the minimap as well, which helps a lot with that sort of stuff.
You shouldn't have to rely on that. As you're heading towards engineering, even though you're in a corridor, you want to start seeing those engineering-y elements bleeding out into the room, so it doesn't feel too stale. And then when you get up to habitation and stuff, you want things to be a little bit more clad, a little bit more refined.
TL;DRThe command module's weakness is a bug, since damage is meant to pass through to the main hull; a fix is expected in an upcoming hotfix, though the developers call such fixes tentative.
I've seen a lot of discourse about it being artificially weak, which I think is not intended. It should be passing damage through to the main ship rather than killing everything. But there is some intent design-wise. The number one question everyone always has about the Ironclad is, why can't I fly it from the main bit? And that's never been the idea with this ship. You have this main block of a ship, same with the Caterpillar, and the command module gives you that functionality to fly around. That's the sort of USP of these sort of ships.
It's not the same as every other ship. There's always this assumption that you're trying to make every single ship be the ultimate ship, and it's not. The ships are supposed to have certain trade-offs. You get this, but you lose this. If you don't like it, that's fine. There are 200-some-odd other ships out there. The command module is interesting because it is, for all intents and purposes, a standalone craft. It can do everything a standalone ship can do. It can go to quantum. There was some confusion internally earlier, people kept referring to it as a parasite ship, and I'm like, no, if anything, the main hull is the parasite, because it needs the command module to survive, not the other way around. So as far as it being a critical weak point, that's something with the damage not being passed in?
Yeah, simply, it's a bug. The intention with the feature itself is for the command module to not be a critical part, clearly for gameplay purposes, because you don't want a very big, durable ship like the Ironclad should be to get shot down by whoever with the command module being destroyed in very, very few shots, because clearly the size difference is enormous. So the damage is going to be passed onto the Ironclad specifically, or the Caterpillar, depending on which one you are attached to. And all the damage to the components themselves would be passed to the Ironclad as well. So everything inside the command module would be in a dormant state, so to say. So basically the damage is going to be passed onto the main body.
Yeah, exactly, a suitable raft that you can immediately go away and flee from it. The cool stuff is that you can also trigger the self-destruct and then leave the ship and fly out with the command module. So have fun with that.
There should be a new series of fixes going out on Tuesday of next week that address a couple other things with the item recovery stuff. So if we can, we'll loop that in there. So that should be better for people before DefenseCon [ends].
It is clearly the intended gameplay dynamic that we want to reach, because clearly we don't want you to lose the ship, especially with the item recovery patch as well.
TL;DRThe Ironclad Assault has more guns, a larger front door that fits tanks, a service bay for repair, refuel and rearm, and some quad-mount turrets, in exchange for somewhat less cargo capacity.
It's got more guns. That's one of the big ones. It has a larger front door. Again, something from the concept time, there was an intentional difference that the Ironclad Assault is designed for assault. So it's got a big enough front door on it that can fit tanks and Ballistas, which the base Ironclad can't. That can only really fit rover-sized vehicles. It trades off some cargo capacity, so it's 1,500-odd, which is actually, I think, pretty much what the original Ironclad concept had. So they both had a glow-up.
Yes, the services bay, which is located in the rear third, which Will is handily looking at here, denoted by the floor texture difference and the half gantries above.
It's just anything that can fit in the zone. If you can fit it in the volume, then it will allow you to do it. And if you obviously have the supplies on board.
Ship hangar service is probably one of my favorite features that have come online with 4.8. Because now you see all the people that do the crazy fleet operations, and now being able to actually repair, refuel and rearm on the go gives tremendous utility to things like the Idris, beyond just, hey, I'm a railgunner. And even things like the 890 Jump, the 600i stuff, and as those continue to progress, they'll get more utility. The vehicle services thing, it's repair, refuel and rearm. You need RMC to do the repairs. You need fuel and commodities and ammo and countermeasures. And the ammo stuff is new for 4.8, actually having commodities. And then it's got the additional remote turrets.
Because people get knocked around when you're going into atmosphere, to be blunt. It was somewhere so that you don't have to sit inside your tank while you actually land, and you can go sit in the jump seats and not get thrown over.
TL;DRSmall snub ships are meant to threaten small craft, not bigger ships, with strong handling offsetting weak guns; the armor damage threshold is still subject to change, and balance will be revisited.
Well, our balance tuning will be revisited in the future, but in general, this is the deal. We want those little snub ships to be a threat to smaller craft like the Gladius, for example, and not a threat to something bigger, like mostly everything else on this table. So the question is more where you should try to employ those ships and what you should use them for, because clearly, on the other side, yes, you might say the gun size is a bit low, but the performance instead is outstanding, because the overall forward thrust ratio is very good. Maneuverability, the rates of rotation are amazing. The handling as well. It's very reactive. So you might have less powerful guns, but if you want to, for example, storm a couple of fighters and fight them, then probably it's a good tool to do that. Clearly there are downsides on the durability, it's Drake and everything else.
Yeah, you can use ballistics as well. But we now have, with the armor system, some damage threshold that you need to meet in order to apply any damage.
And also, nothing prevents you from going out in a group and using other types of ships to bring down the armor and then using other ships that have less powerful guns to then apply damage as well.
TL;DRFuture Origin ships may or may not resemble the M80 depending on role, but they should keep a core Origin identity while manufacturers' designs can vary and evolve over time.
I think it really depends on the role and depends on what we want to do with it. Obviously we want an Origin ship to feel like an Origin ship, and I think that's key to it. You see this vehicle lined up against the others, you can see the DNA from it, and that's what we want to keep. It really depends on the role of the ship. If we do more fighters, we might take similar inspirations. If we do more commercial ships, we might not. In the more commercial stuff, we've looked at a lot of yachts, that side of things, whereas, personally, a yacht doesn't feel very combat. So I think there's a lot of range within our manufacturers to experiment with visuals, and I think that's one of the nice things of the game that we work on, that we are able to try new ideas and experiment with new visual ideas.
It's combined two different DNAs. You've got the Origin DNA, and Origin has its own identity, but you wouldn't expect an industrial Origin ship or a combat Origin ship to look the same. You'd expect them to be completely different. This is one of our first times doing a very dedicated, completely only combat-focused Origin ship, and it has a little bit of difference, but it's the same way that a combat Drake ship is a bit different from a combat...
You see it in real-life automotive manufacturing and aeronautic manufacturing as well, that even though Boeing makes planes, they also make helicopters, and Rolls-Royce makes engines, not just cars.
Mitsubishi makes everything. You're touching on one of my biggest pet peeves here. When people are like, that doesn't look like X manufacturer, or Y manufacturer wouldn't do that, I always go to Mitsubishi. This is the same company that makes tanks, refrigerators, elevators.
I do think it's important to keep some kind of core DNA. When there's a BMW right behind you, you know it's a BMW. There's always these core parts of the DNA of the manufacturer. I think Alberto touched on it perfectly when he was doing the first fly-around, about how Origin always reconnects the lines back around, and that core art direction can be applied to other contexts. There's core rules, and then there's areas to flex those rules.
But even brands evolve over time. In the fiction of our universe, some of these ships, like the Idris and the Javelin, are hundreds of years old. So why would an Aegis ship today look anything like an Idris that was designed 200 years ago? They've got new people. They come in with new ideas, new technologies.
Technically, the Connie folks are flying right now is the Mark IV. You saw that change from the Mark III back in the day. RSI is a great one. You look at the new Aurora. It's not that the old ones never happened. It's that these things evolve.
Within RSI as well, if you look at the Polaris, it's the more military-centered, whereas if you look at things like the Apollo, it's a little bit cleaner and not military. Look at the Connie as well, like the Phoenix. They're very different DNA, but at the same time, they're both very obviously RSI.
So what does losing the docking collar do, though? Folks have been asking in the chat what happened to the docking collar. What does that do for your gameplay?
TL;DRThe Tiburon is the anti-capital heavy gunship, with forward-facing turrets and deliberately sluggish handling so it isn't effective against smaller ships like the Perseus, and it is vulnerable to torpedoes.
The only thing for me to talk about is this completes the trifecta of heavy gunships. So you have the Hammerhead, which is your anti-fighter. You have the Perseus, which is your anti-large ships. And then this is your anti-capital. Everything is designed to face forwards with this.
The gunship mentality has always been engaging multiple targets. The Hammerhead and the Perseus are all about attacking multiple targets simultaneously. And this is the first gunship that's like, no, focus fire to take down capital ships.
It still has those four remote turrets, so it can spread its fire, but really you want all that fire going in one direction. It still has its anti-fighter turret at the very rear, just for a little bit more coverage, but realistically, your four main turrets at the front are designed to hit something bigger. You might be able to hit a fighter with it if you have a very, very good shot and the pilot isn't trying to avoid you, but realistically you're aiming at something big because you want to hurt it.
Yeah, and the tuning reflects that as well in general. From the batch of ships that we have for 4.8, this has been probably the most difficult one to tackle for us, because it has a very specific purpose, and you want, as a designer, to let the ship fulfill that purpose, and only that one. And the risk with this powerful weapon was basically to let it be too effective against everything else that it was not supposed to be, for example against a Perseus or against a smaller ship like the Constellation. So our challenge here was to make the ship interesting in order to go up against capital ships. So it was having enough maneuverability and enough agility to cope with an Idris and be somewhat safe just by orbiting around, keeping the distance, but also to not be effective against something smaller than an Idris, like for example a Perseus. The way we did that was basically playing with the overall feeling of the ship. The ship is going to feel way heavier than a Hammerhead, for example, even though they are similar. Clearly, you have a giant laser beam on top of your head when you're piloting it, so you're going to feel it. You're going to struggle to stay on smaller targets, because once again, the ship is going to be not responsive at all. But clearly you don't need it against a very giant target like an Idris or even something bigger. So this is going to be interesting to see come into play, because also it's not going to be as armored as the Perseus. So it can be potentially threatened by those smaller ships. So maybe a Perseus showing up in the battlefield would pose a serious threat against a Tiburon and could maybe nail it quite quickly if their gunners are very strong.
TL;DRPreparing for engineering is a huge amount of work: ships must be reworked, tested and tweaked, since older ships were set up differently, and the vehicle design team is currently adjusting the features due in December.
That's been crazy. It's a huge amount of work, and it isn't just, they finish the feature, here's how you do it, off you go. We work with them to do the prototypes for it as well, so we actually test out and implement it on, normally, a test vehicle that gets chosen. But then to go back, because we've been developing ships for eight, nine, ten years at this point, how we've set stuff up over the years has changed as well. So how we have to deconstruct and then reconstruct it to work is different depending on when the ship was released. So on top of having to actually get the ships out and release all the new content, any downtime is spent on a combination of either bug fixing, quality of life for existing ships, or doing all of this feature support. Right now, the entirety of the vehicle design team is off doing tweaks and changes to improve how the features coming out in December feel and play. And we're actively making changes from what we thought it was going to be to what feels better and is a better experience. Literally right now, the team is sat doing it.
Yeah, part of the challenge is even simple things like making sure the ships have got fire extinguishers. We've known that's been coming for a while, and we've been adding them to a lot of our ships as soon as we knew that was coming. But we didn't necessarily know exactly how that system was going to work, and we had no real way of testing it. So really now, a lot of the time, you think, oh yeah, most ships have got them, it's fine, but we still need to go through, test them all, make sure they all work, and realise that, oh, actually, there's a bit of collision that is a tiny bit too big. It looks fine, but we had no way of testing it. And it's those sort of little things that catch us out. On the art side, we're probably in a better place because our side is less impacted by it. I think it's really the design side that's weathering the...
For engineering, there's a lot that goes into it that the players just don't see. We could spend two hours talking about how we do it, but essentially we've been doing this process under the hood over the last 18 months, two years, near enough: basically stripping out the old item pipe system and replacing it with the resource network. That was a lot of manual labor. The way it's been in the game since before 4.0, all the items have basically just automatically connected themselves. That was just to get the system in functional. And now we've been doing the passes of actually physically linking all the items correctly to the relays. So people will have seen, in larger multi-crew ships that have released in the last two years, physical relays, physical items, and it's literally connecting up the resource network for those. So when you have a ship that has an engineering screen, you can see all these connections, you can manage it. And for the initial release, everything will support engineering. It just comes in different stages. Obviously, everything has to work, step one. It's not always a guarantee, let's just be real. But obviously, a single-seater is less work and has fewer requirements than, say, the Polaris. In a single-seater, you have the ability to repair your items through the MFD. And that's our fallback case for a ship that doesn't have physical components: you'll be able to do that gameplay from the cockpit, from an MFD. And then as we go through the ships, physicalizing all the items and adding engineering screens (again, not every ship will have an engineering screen, because it just doesn't make sense), you get more and more of that gameplay unlocked. But it's not like a ship that doesn't have physical components is way better for the gameplay than one that does. They both get impacted the same.
TL;DRA first version of armor is coming as part of engineering when it returns to PTU, and they say it will change combat balance and reward larger crews.
Well, yeah, it's coming too. Engineering's been on Tech Preview for a little while. It was on Tech Preview without armor when they had just finished the code check-in. I was talking to Torsten earlier today. When it returns to PTU, I think tomorrow or the day after, as soon as the build is where it needs to be, armor, the first version of armor, will be in as part of engineering. And it's going to dramatically change the balance between ballistics and lasers and all that stuff, different tiers of ships and everything. It's just fundamentally different how combat's going to play out. You're now going to have this choice: sure, I can use lasers if I want to peel down the shields and then melt the armor, or if I know where the shield generator is and I've got ballistics, I can punch right through that and take those out faster. It's going to be a really interesting challenge and change to combat. The more you know these ships, the more effective you're going to be. And then, of course, continuing changes to the flight model will make that better as time goes on.
It also massively benefits people actually taking larger crews, because if you're trying to fly on your own, you can't go around repairing all the components in the bigger ships. So it encourages you to actually go out with your friends, because you stay in the fight a bit longer. It's going to be a huge shift in the dynamic of the multi-crew ships.
TL;DRA rework is for ships whose existing design doesn't fit their role, gold standard adds missing features, and a Mark II expands a ship that still works; an Aurora gold standard and Mark II are confirmed.
So with reworks versus Mark IIs, it depends on what we're trying to achieve and whether what already exists actually achieves that. So using the 600i as a prime example, just as a talking point. When we made the original 600i, we had a particular vision for how we wanted the interior to be used and laid out. And then as the game evolved, we realized that the interior just doesn't work for what we actually want the ship to be able to do, what we want to achieve, what we want the experience to be while using it. And realistically, if that ship was left in the state that it was, it wouldn't actually fit its role or purpose within the game. So we want to rework something like that. It needs to be taken back and then re-reviewed. And obviously everyone's seen the rework images, the concept board, this entire thread on Spectrum where people are keeping track of everything we've ever said and covered about it. That's the rework. That's when what's there doesn't work. It doesn't need tweaking. It doesn't need things adding. It doesn't need minor changes. It's straight up, it just needs removing and putting back in. The gold standard can sometimes be just bringing something up to scratch. So that's adding, say, the suit locker that's missing, or the weapon rack doesn't work, or other features that help the gameplay experience but don't require us to fundamentally change something about the ship. And then the Mark IIs exist where the Mark I, the original, still works for the role, but we want to make it bigger and better, and we don't want to get rid of the original that's fulfilling that role. So if we talk about the Aurora... oh man, I'm getting in trouble after this. Okay, so people are now hearing the Aurora is getting the gold standard. So what that is: the interior still mostly works, but there are some tweaks needed to make it work with our gameplay loops. But we don't need to strip the entire interior back. It needs a place to put weapons. It needs a place so you can actually walk inside with storage boxes. It needs a fire extinguisher. We don't need to gut the entire ship. So that's why the Aurora is getting its gold standard. It doesn't need a full rework. And we don't want to change what the Aurora is, because the Aurora, it's the Aurora. So that's when a Mark II might come along, because we could do something bigger, better, different, something we're more interested and engaged in, something that allows it to be more than what it was, but is something new.
Yeah, the Aurora Mark II is a thing. I'm not going to go into details about it, but it allows us to take the DNA of what a Mark I is and then expand upon it, make it something different, make it the next generation of itself.
If you look at it compared to the Hornets, the Hornet Mark II and the Mark I side by side, you can tell they are both Anvil Hornets, even though they are stylistically very different. They're the same role, they're the same rough shape, and that's what we want to do with the Mark I Auroras and the Mark II: you look at it and go, that's an Aurora. It does the same roles, but it's the new RSI style.
TL;DRHull D and E capacity is dropping substantially to more reasonable levels, to 6,912 and 12,288 SCU, because the original numbers were impractical; they remain the top bulk carriers and aren't coming in 2026.
Hull D and E owners, sit down, because this is going to sound like bad news, but it's the news. Your cargo capacity is going quite a long way down. So the D, and I've got my notes here, is going down to 6,912 SCU, which is a lot of SCU. And the E is going down to 12,288 SCU. Gut reaction, that's a big drop from, I think, 98,000, and I can't remember what the D was. But for years, people quite rightly said, this is going to be so boring, I don't want to sit and load 3,000-plus 32 SCU containers by hand, or even in an org. Economy-wise, huge concerns. And then performance-wise, also huge concerns. So whilst they have on paper gone down by a big percentage, they are still the absolute top. And we have no plans currently to have any ships that get anywhere near those. I can't think of one that actually beats the Hull C at this point in terms of cargo capacity. So the D and E are still the cream of the crop. Their role remains unchanged as the bulk and super carriers. Their SCU comes down to more reasonable levels.
I'd genuinely be curious to see how long it would take to load a Hull E with the original numbers. Hand on heart, genuinely curious how long it would take to put that many 32 SCUs on it.
Yeah, and we looked at the concept meshes of it, and there are some quirks. They basically add an extra spindle for the D and then for the E. But the scaling's all off, and there was just no way we could even get to those numbers with the current actual cargo metrics. The spindles would have had to quadruple in size. I think proportionally it would look interesting.
TL;DRBoth Ironclad variants' cargo is going up, with figures that may shift slightly before release, because layout changes in whitebox, like moved ladders and a bulkhead, freed space that looked odd left empty.
So that's obviously in production. Again, monthly reports: backlogged ships are always mentioned in there. We don't keep them a secret. Ironclad cargo capacity, both of them are going up. So the base Ironclad was 1,536. That's going up to 2,204. And the Assault's going from 1,152 to 1,440. This is why I have it written down. Again, they may change slightly as we get close to release, but it's that proportional change. Why did that happen?
We reshuffled the inside of it. It was the bulkhead move and changing where the ladders were. As we went through whitebox with the actual layout, we get a good chance to walk around and play and feel what the ship would be like. There were a few changes to the layout and how we were orientating everything. And as things push and pull around a little bit, there's a little bit more space. It made sense to fill it. So we ended up putting a little bit more cargo in there. It's one of those things where there might be a little bit of change. We'll never go down, but we'll sometimes take it up a little. Well, sometimes we might go down; we talked about the Hull D and E. But it made sense from the layout and everything. So it just got a little bit more cargo, because it made sense to add it, and it looked dumb not being there, because it just looked like a gap.
Yeah, I think that's it. When we were looking at it, there were some gaps in the cargo grid, and it's like, if they're justifiable, it's fine. But when there's just a gap, people are just going to shove more cargo in anyway.
Well, it was just because the ladders moved. Originally, there were paths so you could get to the ladders, to the catwalks, but because we moved them out to the side, it just didn't make sense anymore.
TL;DRNo, the Perseus's outside walkway won't get gravity plates using the current physics-grid method, which has too many bad side effects, though other ways to do it aren't ruled out.
No. Next question. A lot of people love those areas outside of the ships that you can walk around. There are some really fun, annoying bugs and technical consequences that happen as a result of basically abusing the setup to get that to function. And for the Perseus, we really just wanted it for planetside, like, I've landed on a planet in my Perseus, and I've got this nice little balcony on the side of it. I can go out of the rear bridge airlock door and then just survey the land and defend the ship from there.
It's not to say that we won't ever explore gravitational plates on the walkway. It's just not going to be the physics grid method that we currently use, that we used to have on the outside of the Carrack's top, with people clipping themselves onto the back of it and stuff. That's not what that system's intended for, and there are way too many consequences as a result of using it.
TL;DRIn 4.5 the Polaris's back-right bridge station will get torpedo control, but the pilot won't, because the team wants enforced balance between ships and the Polaris torpedoes are far stronger than the Perseus's.
The gun, not the missile. So the back-right station of the Polaris bridge will now have torpedo control as well. You can use it from there. There's still a reason to go down into the depths of the ship to use it, because you then get that 360 camera, and it also has a much larger queue of missiles from there. How many did we settle on? Eight?
So if you want to bankrupt yourself, go down to the basement of the Polaris and queue up eight torpedoes. So yes, we do want to, and people will have it in 4.5. So at least they're on the bridge together doing things. Why not the pilot? Because we want to have some enforced balance there. The Perseus torpedoes are way smaller, way less damage compared to the Polaris ones.
It's like when the Mercury Star Runner owners look at the Clipper and it has a second entrance. It's easy to want every ship to have everything. It's real easy and completely understandable from a player standpoint, let's just be real. You have your favorite ship, and your favorite ship can't do something that some other ship does, and that irks. It just makes your brain itch. This is my favorite ship, and I want my favorite ship to do everything, because it's my favorite and this is the last ship I want to fly. Weirdly, that's not exactly great game design. You don't want everybody to just pick one ship and have that be the only ship they ever fly for the remainder of their time in the game, because that becomes boring. You want choice. You want compelling differences between this ship, that ship, and the other ship. So while there are certainly things that can be done, like adding control to another station on the Polaris to bring certain things into parity, you don't want this forced equalization of all things.
Without even looking at the chat over there, I can already tell they're going, well, the Polaris doesn't have this, why does the Idris pilot get the railgun? And I can see that. It's a different problem, in that if you don't give the pilot of a ship that has a fixed weapon on the front of it control over firing that weapon, it's basically useless. You will never hit anything trying to coordinate between two people with something that requires such accuracy. That doesn't mean that we're happy with how powerful that railgun or beam is and won't look to balance that in the future. But it's not justification for the Polaris pilot or co-pilot. Because we also had this discussion: why don't we just give it to the co-pilot on the Polaris? Well, then no one will sit in the pilot seat, because they'll go sit in the co-pilot seat, because they can fly and then shoot the torpedoes at the same time. So it's all a fun multi-layered thing, and it can seem like, oh, they're just ignoring the problem, but there are lots of things to get into.
Yeah, and I think there are loads of balance things, and loads of things that we've just learned over time that we could improve on. And we're not saying we're never going to go back and make improvements to ships, but these guys are trying to balance them.
TL;DRThe Salvation's salvage heads are locked and forgiving because it's a starter ship meant to introduce salvage without added complexity, and locked bespoke versions let the team tune them if they underperform.
The main role and purpose of the Salvation is to be an introduction to the entire world of salvage. It's a good entry ship just to get started. And we wanted the heads that came with it specifically to be an easy experience. So it's very forgiving, but obviously the result is that the yield isn't very good. It's just supposed to be, hey, listen, you don't really know what you're doing very well with it yet, so let's make it nice and easy for you. And then if you end up really liking the career and wanting to progress, you move out of the Salvation. So we wanted to be able to very strictly control that experience and not have that head used on other ships, because it's not meant to be a good, optimal head. It's literally a starter. That's it in a nutshell: we don't want to add complexity to a starter. It's the same thing we did with the Golem earlier this year. When we originally talked about them, we talked about them being opposite sides, one salvage...
TL;DRThe Clipper has only two small shields because it is meant to be a jack of all trades with limited balance, small shields can be crafted aboard, and larger ones wouldn't fit without enlarging the ship.
Again, it's the jack of all trades, master of none. When we were doing this ship, it had quite a few internal nicknames for its roles and capabilities, and we were pretty concerned. When people first heard about it, they were like, this is going to break the game. We need to have some form of balance and control on it, and that's why it doesn't have a huge amount of shields. And a benefit of having size one shields is that you can actually craft size one shields. If your shield gets destroyed, you can go craft another one on board and go fix it. Whereas a size two shield probably wouldn't fit. We wouldn't have had space to fit it in. The ship would have got even bigger, taller and longer to fit that.
Yes. So the actual parasite stuff, for being able to take control of the larger ship and flight control, we've actually got the first playable coming up very soon. They've used a prototype on existing ships, but the Ironclad and the command module have been built with it in mind. There are slight tweaks needed for them to use it, but the first playable's coming up soon, and we're currently on track to have it come out with the actual release of the Ironclad.