Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the great things about the Vulcan is it can repair a whole bunch of stuff, including itself. The repair system, using the drones, the drones repair. So if you've got a broken drone or a broken ship or a broken vehicle, you're up to it. We've got a repair attachment to them and then you can surface repair. Obviously, it depends on the extent of the damage.
There's not going to be some random line of code in there saying, don't allow healing your own ship. That's not what it's about. It can do anything within its capabilities.
There's a few different ways you can repair a ship. Obviously, if it's got a broken engine or something like that, you can go up to that engine and actually either replace it out or repair that particular piece of the ship, but also there's this hull repair, and one of the systems we've got in place or that's coming is this kind of synthesis of metals and materials to create these kind of compounds that hulls will be structured out of. So through mining or through other forms of collection or purchasing from stores, you can collect these metals, and then when you send a drone over, you can apply that as a mixture, essentially spot fixing, essentially spraying on this kind of fixer liquid metal that will seal up the hull and make it safe again to fly.
TL;DRRepair crews fix whatever damage they can on site, and bring spare replacement parts when needed, carried in the cargo bay, with severity deciding what is possible.
Right. But if you were a repair crew, it's kind of what's the damage? What can I fix? The same way that if you've got a broken wheel or something on the side of the motorway or the highway or whatever, you pull over, I need to get this repaired. And some things you can repair on site, and sometimes someone will come up and say, oh, I got a spare tire, I got a new battery, and they can bring replacement parts, or, oh yeah, that'll just need a dinging out. Sometimes you can fix a broken part there on the side of the road, or sometimes you just need patching up a tire. Whatever the severity of the problem will dictate whether or not.
So if you're the pilot of a Vulcan, you use the drones to repair the hull, and then you might need a supply of replacement components, the spare tires.
And that's the kind of thing, like if you get a service beacon of, hey, I'm in trouble here, I need replacement parts. Then that's something that's kind of, oh, I've got one of those with me, I can come straight out, or, okay, give me 20 minutes, I'll go pick up some replacement parts and I'll put that on your bill kind of thing. So it's that kind of go fetch if you've not got it. As long as the ship can carry it, it's the right size to carry it, then they can come and bring that out to you and it's all part of the service.
Yeah, that's sort of why that cargo bay is there in the back. It's for storing cargo, but it can also be there for storing all the spare parts that you might decide to... They specialize in coolers and just fill it full of coolers. If you're in a particularly hot environment and people's coolers are getting worn out because it's hot and they're constantly hitting their overheat threshold and degrading quicker than expected, then you're there giving these coolers, well, not giving them away, it's not good business, but you're there on site knowing that this trend in behavior is going to repeat itself so you can maximize that.
TL;DRThe Vulcan is a support ship, not a flying factory, so pilots must choose what fuel, parts and components to carry, and knowing where to source them cheaply is an unspoken part of the career.
Yeah. It's not a flying factory. It's a support ship that will come out and it'll bring with it the fuel and the parts and the replacement hull compounds that you're going to need. Obviously, if you're smart about it and you know what's in demand, what kind of things are big right now, you might think, oh, the common weapons, let's have a couple of those on site at all times, because someone's always going to want some extra missiles or something and these are the common missiles, the sizes that we'll want. Anything that's kind of specialist parts, then you may, okay, give me a minute, I'll have to go and pick that up from a... I know a guy that can acquire these kind of things. Knowing where you can pick up certain bits and where you're going to get a discount and things like that is probably going to be this kind of unspoken second side of the career, of where are the good hardware stores around here? Where can I get engine parts for cheap kind of thing?
Yeah, there's sort of multiple ways you can play. You can be the guy that's got a bit of everything, can react to any situation, you're out in space waiting for the call. Or you could be the guy that keeps my cargo bay empty of everything until I get a call, and I'm lurking near a truck stop or a station and I can get exactly what they want. It might take me a bit longer to get there, but they get exactly what they want, versus quick response and, well, this is the only power plant I've got. So do you want power or do you not want power?
I think it's cool that as we're talking about the repair and the rearming for ships, we're also looking at the salvage side of things, and not to divert the conversation, but when we get to a point where you'll find a derelict and you're stripping it for parts, like, oh, this is good. And all of a sudden other players become secondhand dealers and, you know, one careful owner had this shield generator, but they crashed into a rock, so this is still good. And you can sell between the players, picking up things at a discount from local merchants rather than going to stores. The player-driven economy from that side is something that could become huge then, where it's like, oh, I know a guy that can get me some extra ammo, I've got these extra parts, or I've stripped the hull of another ship, so I've got all those extra metals that I can use. We just apply it to a new ship.
TL;DRIn the initial design the Vulcan does not scoop fuel itself but refuels from tanks filled by a fuel provider, acting as a go-between and a profession starter ship rather than a Starfarer replacement.
Certainly in the initial design for it, that's not a thing. It has the big external tank underneath that's sort of segregated into two tanks. So it has an external quantum fuel tank and an external hydrogen fuel tank. So you fill up from a provider of fuel rather than collecting it yourself, and then it's up to you to give that to players. Like the Starfarer, you can set your prices for it. If you want to sell at a discount to incentivize business, up to you. But chances are the reason someone will come to you is someone's in need of something desperately. So you've sort of got the advantage there.
Sorry, it's not a factory to produce this stuff. It's kind of a go-between of, I can get you that stuff. I will help you out and I will get you on the move again, rather than I can create infinite fuel or whatever.
Which is why I know some folks were concerned that we rendered their Starfarers obsolete. Obviously not. There's a reason we refer to this as the profession starter ship. This is for your first forays into refueling. And then you're supposed to work your way up to a Starfarer, because a Starfarer is a much bigger, broader, and probably more expensive to maintain and operate ship, I would imagine.
If you look at the size of the drone compared to just one of the fuel pods on the back of the Starfarer, it's a huge difference in volume. And then the Starfarer has six of those. So it's like turning up with a little jerry can of fuel to get you going versus turning up with a fuel truck.
TL;DROwners would choose the Vulcan for flexibility: it covers refueling, rearming and repair in varying ratios, or even plain cargo hauling, rather than the single specialization a Starfarer offers.
Flexibility, really, and variety. If you're a Starfarer owner, someone who's interested in running it, you clearly have a heavy passion for refueling and helping that out. But if you get a mission for something else and it's not really involving fueling, then, well, no.
That's the other thing as well, you've got to hedge your bets then that there's going to be a lot of people that need to refuel. Whereas rearming is very common and someone's going to take damage. I've played the game for more than two minutes. People shoot each other a lot. So they're going to need new ammo and they're going to need a patch job. So that kind of thing of, I can top you up on fuel, I can top you up on ammo, I can patch that hole in the hull. People aren't necessarily going to just want that one thing, the specialization that the Starfarer provides. The Vulcan has got everything covered.
Every time you play, you could be doing a different ratio of these three things. You can always ignore all those if you want and just use it as a 12-SCU cargo ship, which is not the best in the world, but it allows you to do that. So you've got, I don't want to say free rein, you've got the flexibility to...
You can do four separate ships at the same time, or you could do one ship four times in a go. Rather than just being that little top up, it could be four sequential refuels. You've got enough to get out of atmosphere again for all those people that have gone down to a planet hogging afterburner and now could not get back up again. Here's enough to get you out to a fuel station and maybe a bit more back home as well.
And a lot of times as well, you call out a Starfarer, and the cost of that, of a big ship making all that leap to come to you, and it's like, I just needed enough to get home. I just needed enough to get to a station and I'll sort myself out from there. They don't necessarily want the works. They just want enough to get me out of this pickle.
TL;DRInitially the loop is not very hands-on: the player flies each drone manually from a support station, one function at a time, while how rearming and component replacement physically transfer from hold to ship is still undecided.
Initially, it's probably not going to be very tactile, hands-on. It will go towards that as time goes on, but the initial loop will be controlling that drone. You go to the support station to control the drone. You pick what you're going to do with it, whether you will rearm or repair. The drones can only do one function at a time without re-docking. So you set it in repair mode. You manually fly it over to the thing you're going to repair. It's not a case of, oh, there's a ship next to me, drone, go repair that, and off it toddles. You've got to fly it yourself, do the repair yourself from that station. The same for refueling and rearming. Refueling, obviously, there is going to be a point on the ship that it has to lock onto to transfer, and the fuel is on the ship itself, so there's a physical connection. The rearming and the replacing components is a bit TBD at the moment. Obviously, there's physical ammo boxes and physical components. It's working out how we want to transition the stores you have to that drone to the ship.
A lot of ship items that are broken potentially are inside. And so we don't necessarily want drones to then be flying through corridors kind of thing. So the logistics of how do we get it from my cargo hold over to there is still under...
TL;DRThe Vulcan handles small to medium repairs cheaply as a starting point, while the Crucible has the facilities and crew to manufacture and replace large damage, and the two can complement each other.
Again, it's the scale of it. The Vulcan's great for those little small repairs, small to medium repairs. If you've got, I don't know, a Caterpillar and half the front's missing, that's something the Vulcan's not going to be able to manufacture and replace it with. Whereas the Crucible, it's got its remote arms, it's got the onboard facilities to do that. It's sort of the economy of scale. You saw in the concept images the Vulcan's hanging around a Javelin doing small repairs, but if that Javelin's taken huge damage, that's where the Crucible comes in. And again, the same pros and cons as with the Starfarer. If you've got a Crucible, I'm doing repair. That's what I've chosen to do. It's like a flying mechanics warehouse, really. And the Crucible has actually got a little bit bigger than it was, because the Hornet's got bigger. It has that enclosed workspace where you can put an entire ship in, close the doors, repair it all, replace everything. If it's too big to go in there, then you're alongside doing the big repairs.
So again, just like it is with the Starfarer, the Vulcan is meant to be your starting point for these professions. It allows you to explore multiple professions at once. It lets you operate these professions less expensively and with a lower threshold of commitment than operating a Crucible or a Starfarer would. But when you decide, hey, okay, I really do like repair, I really do like refueling and whatnot, your upgrade paths are to the Starfarer or to the Crucible.
Yeah, you're going to need a big crew. You're going to need to pay them when you get the money for the job. So the costs, like you say, to operate a ship like that, where every hand is pulling together, you're expecting a big payday. So you don't get called out for the smaller jobs.
They're not exclusive options either. I can see an org, if there's a dedicated repair org out there, you call for help, my ship's damaged, they're probably going to send a Vulcan first because of the cost involved in getting a Crucible out there. The Vulcan will be there to do what it can, like patch up perhaps the hull breaches and holes, repair some of the basic components, but if after that everything's safe, secure, the atmosphere is refilling, but it's beyond the Vulcan's capabilities, then you've got the Crucible that can come out and finish the job.
TL;DRThe Vulcan is smaller, faster, more maneuverable and more armored than a Cutlass-sized ship, with defensive turrets, so it draws less fire and gets in and out of tight places and planets more cheaply, though it isn't stealthy.
Yeah, obviously it's way smaller than a Crucible or Starfarer. It's faster, more maneuverable. And for its size, it's definitely more armored than, say, a Cutlass, which is roughly in that size bracket. It's because it's going to be hanging around doing stuff. It does have the turrets on there to do defense. It needs to absorb those natural hits that are going to be in there. Whereas if you came storming in in a Crucible, as soon as you get anywhere near, there's this huge bulk of a ship. Everything's just going to be drawn to that, whereas the Vulcan sneaks...
Same for going down to planetside. The fuel cost and the degradation on your components from doing multiple re-entries in big ships is going to take its toll. And if you've called out repair for your M50 that's crashed on Daymar or something like that, you probably don't want to pay the repair bill for a Crucible to come and do that. You want something more in your price range.
TL;DRDrones can probably be swapped between ships since they are self-contained, but they would lose specialized functions that depend on the host ship, such as the Vulcan's fuel line.
I would imagine you can, but the usability of them takes a severe dent. Naturally, the Vulcan has the ability to pipe fuel into it. The Reclaimer doesn't have that. So you could probably take the salvage drone out of the Reclaimer and put it in the Vulcan. It's all self-contained, so it's fine. They can carry stuff fine, but some of the more specialized functions they're going to struggle with.
Yeah, because you've got a fuel line from the tank underneath to the drone, so you can fuel the drone up before sending it out. You could potentially have a salvage drone that takes fuel from wrecked ships and brings it back and then tops back up your tank. So you could potentially see a way where you would have a salvage drone useful as one of the four. If you have cargo drones on some ships or if you have other types of drones, it's like, well, I have no need of a repair drone because I can't send fuel to it and I can't put metals into it kind of thing. You're limiting yourself. But the option could still be there potentially.
TL;DRThe number of ships served depends on the damage and fuel needed, it will be settled through game balance, and the speakers promise you can always get a stranded ship home to the nearest base.
Yeah, I mean, you've got a tank with a capacity. You could be running on empty and you're like, I just need enough to get me by. So you might only need 10% of that tank to get someone out. Or they may need 50. We flew too close to the sun, quite literally. We're going to need new coolers and we're going to need fuel to get us all the way back to Port Olisar. And that might be 90% of the tank. Yeah, it's a piece of string kind of question.
I don't see it being a single ship, if that's the sort of loaded question, unless that ship has required absolutely everything. Like, I need all your fuel. I need complete repair as much as you can. My ammo is all out. That's probably an edge case thing.
Ultimately, I think it's probably the kind of thing that gets figured out through game balance. When the day comes and the Vulcan gets introduced in the game, whatever values it has on that day will go through the same testing as everything else. So however many ships you can repair the day it gets introduced will not necessarily be the same number of ships you can repair a month later or a year after that.
Yeah, absolutely. To speak to that point, we're never going to get to a situation where you empty the entire tank of fuel into a stranded ship and it's not even halfway home and then you've got to go back and get more fuel. We're going to make sure that we will be able to get you home to the nearest space base from a ship. At the bare minimum, you will be able to help someone get home.
TL;DRDrones probably won't be able to remove items from ships, and any attempt to damage a ship would be flagged by the existing criminality system, with a ship taking damage treating the culprit as an enemy.
How would you cripple a ship, like actually do damage? Just take the missiles back off again. But I mean, the guy's like, well, where's my missiles? You promised me missiles. I've got 16 missiles, I need four more, and then all of a sudden I've got no missiles and this little cackling robot is flying off with them. Get back here. I wouldn't have thought we would allow them to have the ability to remove items. And I think that goes back to the logistics question of how do we take from our side and give to you, but not leave it as an open door, like, I'm going to turn my back and trust that you're going to put everything in the right place and not take anything for yourself kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the salvage, if you've swapped it for a salvage drone. Essentially, though, the way that salvage is, it's applying essentially damage to the hull as it scrapes the hull off. So if you're in a ship and you start taking damage, then that guy's going to get flagged as an enemy immediately. All cannons fire kind of thing.
TL;DRA solo player can fly the Vulcan, park it and work the drone stations without active piloting, and can set remote turrets to AI control for defense, though only two stations exist for controlling four drones and two turrets.
It doesn't need to be actively flown. It really depends on the scenario. If you're doing it at the edge of atmosphere where gravity is taking effect, it's probably not the wisest time to leave the pilot's seat and start doing stuff. But no, you can fly it by yourself, you can park it up, turn around, jump in one of the support stations, do the drone stuff.
Yeah, so the two support stations control the remote turrets and the drones. Obviously, there's four drones, two turrets, only two places to control it from. You've got to make some decisions about what you're going to do at one time. If you've read the Shipyard posts, which I highly recommend, there's a whole page about remote turrets and how we plan to allow players to essentially give AI control to them. So if you're a solo player, you probably want to take your computer, take out the blades that come with it by default, stick some remote control ones in there. So then those turrets are just automated defense and you can focus on doing repair.
TL;DRAll four drones can be out at once, but only two can be directly controlled at a time through the two stations, so a solo player switches between them while others work.
You can have all four out at the same time, but if you've got two people on the two support stations, then only two can be actively controlled at a time. When I said four on one, that's like chain them up, say four in a row. There's only one fuel port.
Say I'm solo piloting my Vulcan. I go to the support stations. I program two to be fueling, one hydrogen, one quantum, one repair, one rearm. I control the hydrogen one first, fly it over, dock it on. Whilst that's doing that, I switch to the repair one, fly it over, start doing the repair, swap to the rearming one, that launches out, grabs a missile, sticks it on. The fuel one's probably done by now, so I'll fly that back and then fly the quantum one back out.
If you've got another player, then obviously you can do twice as much. If you don't have a second player, then you can always hire NPCs to do that job for you, although how good they are is up to how much you decide to pay them.
I think they can all be out, but only two can be under direct control. So you need to be leaving the other two doing a task. You can make changes to two at a time. That's just for this ship; other ships may vary.
Shields don't stop physical collisions with stuff, like ramming into stuff. I believe the lore of the shields is they just reduce the velocity of objects.
Yeah, so that's why energy weapons sap shields: they have no mass. So they don't go through the shield because they've got no mass to slow down. It just all gets absorbed in, which in turn draws down the shields, whereas ballistics go through shields because they've got the mass to carry on, and they go much faster. So a drone going slowly through it should be fine.
TL;DRWhether the Vulcan can fully restore a ship depends on the damage, since the long-term damage model uses broken parts rather than a health percentage, and severe losses like a missing wing are beyond it.
That kind of goes back to what we were saying before. It depends how damaged the ship is. Just a cockpit of the Hornet... We don't really have this kind of concept of 100% health. You have parts that are broken.
We talked about this loosely last time when I was on Reverse the Verse, about the concept of health and how it is at the moment, just a numerical value, isn't the long-term goal. It's the collection of the item abilities, some of its parts. So going back to 100% health, how damaged is it? Is it just lightly singed from atmospheric entry? Yeah, sure. Is it just the cockpit of the Hornet and everything else is gone? Probably not. That's beyond its capabilities.
Yeah, if you've lost a wing, it's not going to help. But if you've just burnt the hell out of the wing, right, I can fix that. So it's all in degrees of how severe the damage is.
TL;DRThe Vulcan can work on capital ships, effectiveness depends on the damage, and it can fix things like hull breaches and venting, while major structural losses are left to the Crucible.
It's a good time to clarify, to get into the mindset of, it's not just take three health packs and you're at full health again. It's localized, it's physicalized damage. Oh, I've burnt off the whole underside of my ship, so that means if I enter atmosphere or something, I'm going to have a really bad time of it. It's specific damage that's been done to a ship, is how it's the longer term plan for Star Citizen's damage model. So thinking about it in terms of, well, I've broken my engines, so I literally cannot move. And no matter how much you repair the hull, the engines are never going to get fixed. I'll still never be able to move kind of thing. So it's all the degrees of what broke on a capital ship. We've got the Crucible for, right, we need a new wing, you need a new thing, okay, we're going to need to call out the big boys. But if it's a case of we are venting oxygen, the bridge has got a big hole in it...
Right. I mean, if you've taken torpedoes through the sides and everything's vented and there's hull breaches everywhere, they will fix that right up and get you flying again, get you back into the fight.
TL;DRYes, the lightweight drones have small thrusters and can work in atmosphere for ground vehicles too, and the speakers expect the Vulcan to be quite useful on planets.
Yeah, there's a ton of versatility for the Vulcan right there, because the Vulcan, with its greater maneuverability, flying through atmosphere, once the full atmospheric flight model is in and the VTOL engines come online and people aren't just using maneuvering thrusters to hover in atmosphere like they're doing, when all that system comes online, the Vulcan's going to be much more effective in atmosphere than I imagine the Starfarer is.
Vehicle items are much smaller than the rest, so you can fit a lot more in that cargo bay. And from all the stuff I've seen on the forums and Reddit of people going on little expeditions around planets in their rovers and Greycats and Cyclones at some point, they all have components in, just like the ships. So they're going to suffer from the same item degradation and wear. They're going to wear out over time if you're doing stupid things.
The amount of people thrashing those vehicles around. We'll be seeing sandstorms and atmospheric effects like that. The harsh realities of frontier life are going to require some support. And I think the Vulcan getting down to the planet and lending a hand is something that a big, weighty, huge flying factory or fueling station is not going to be interested in. Especially when, oh no, I'm out of fuel, I can't get back to base camp.
TL;DRThe Vulcan isn't prioritized over other ships; ship order follows Squadron 42 needs, which Persistent Universe gameplay systems exist, and team scheduling gaps, so ships like the Carrack wait for supporting gameplay.
The Vulcan specifically is not getting prioritized over anything else at this time. But this question goes more to why do we do some ships before others? And that comes to what's available in the Persistent Universe, in the gameplay systems. There are two driving forces behind how we prioritize our ships. One is, of course, the needs for Squadron 42. The second one is gameplay systems in the Persistent Universe that come online. I know a lot of this goes to, for instance, the Carrack. A lot of people, where's the Carrack? And the Carrack is a giant exploration ship designed for multi-system travel and exploration. And those gameplay elements don't exist in the Persistent Universe right now. So it would be pretty silly to prioritize the Carrack at this moment, given what's available in the Persistent Universe. But of course, we try to keep those things in parity whenever we can.
We're looking at salvage and repair kind of hand in hand right now. We've got some salvage ships coming through. We need the systems to support that. And, well, we need the flip side of that. More and more now that the requirements for refueling and repairing and rearming ships are in the field, the need has become, well, we need a ship for this, but not the huge thing. We need to get this gameplay in and then we can balance it and make it work.
There's also the human resource aspect of it as well. Everyone on the ship art side and the whole ship team has time allocated for each ship in the schedule. If something happens that throws one of those departments out, either everyone just stops and waits for that department to catch up for it to be finished, or they move on to something that can fit in that gap. Say a two-month period opens up for one of the vehicle art teams because something's happened on another feature that has required another team to go on that. You've now got that little two-month gap, and a small newer ship that's been concepted recently could just nicely fit in there to keep everyone continuously working.