Pete Royle

The concept never really looked like it either. It was just one of those things that whilst we were building the ship out, obviously there were quite a few changes made along the way to the exterior. It was just one of those weird things that you sit looking at a ship for a long time, then you start seeing shapes in it. And then once we spotted that, it changed, especially I think the windows broke up the duck face a little.

It's easy to point at the front here as the culprit, but it was just as much the cockpit window that lent itself to the duck profile.

Yeah, that front there, that was one of the things we changed. So earlier on in development, that was inverted, the way it slopes back, and we changed it so it slopes the way it is here, and that kind of echoes how you'd expect a yacht, like you said earlier, a mega yacht, to look. I think it looks a lot better for that now. Then these holes here you're going past, they're going from the top. That was something we added in a little later.

The original concept also didn't have a lot of these details because there was only a select few images done for the exterior. There was a lot of assumption made on what would fill in those details. I think we did a good job on that. If you get really close to the exterior, it's just as detailed as some of our smaller ships.

This is one of the last ships we concepted in 2014 before we made the big switch over into 3D concepts that tend to be more fleshed out.

Yeah, you definitely have to do quite a bit more filling in on some of the older concepts, but we've got Graham, one of our senior artists, doing a fantastic job on this, filling in some of the holes, because obviously with 2D you're only seeing it from certain angles. And then there were some inconsistencies with what we were seeing. Anyone that's looked at the Merchantman concept images will know what we're talking about when we're talking about inconsistencies in images.

Yes, it's very similar, almost identical dimensions to the Argo MPUV transport. The pod on the back of that that has all the seats, it is one of those inside, but done to Origin standards.

So it packs a few, but it's quite cramped, but you're escaping. And we've gone for the raft option, obviously, because it's a luxury ship. We wanted the guests on the upper decks to have a bit more space, rather than further down, as we might see later, the individual escape pods that the crew would use in an emergency.

And for sort of scale reference, this little airlock and antechamber is very similar to the Hammerhead in terms of size and shape. So if you've ever seen a Hammerhead, the mouth on the front of it is that tiny hole on the outside of the ship.

That's right, it's a metric for docking collars in the future. So we try and keep that consistent across other ships.