Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse - A Wild Hammerhead Appears

The original idea was a small patrol boat about the size of the Retaliator, and the general idea was a Retaliator that swapped out its torpedoes for stronger turrets. And from there, the job for the patrol boat was to go around systems and police the area in a sort of defensive way and protect stations and other fleets. We realized that people would be aboard it for much longer than they are on the Retaliator, so they would need a mess hall, proper crew quarters, that sort of thing. So the ship had to get bigger for that, which accordingly meant it needed a bigger engine room and bigger stuff than that. So it practically doubled in size from the initial thing, in the concept phase. This is before any kind of art or concept art had been done for it.

And that's part of what contributed to the whole confusion over the sizes when the concept was announced, and the brochure and everything like that.

Not really. We were looking at it earlier before this, and on the website, I think it's 115 by 75 by 16, and that's pretty much where it comes in at. It's a little tricky because of the turrets, so you can argue about where you measure the ship from. Because if you just measure it from where the turrets mount, the doorways, it's 55 meters. But by the time you put the turrets on, it gets bigger. And so do you count to the edge of the turret, or do you count to the edge of the barrels on the turret, which is where 75 comes from? But that's with the turrets tucked in. So when they're sort of landed and inactive, they retract back into the ship.

So it has like four different sizes.

Yeah, so when it's out and all the turrets are out, it gets even bigger. But landed size, the size people generally care about for fitting on landing pads, fitting in other ships, is the size that is on the website. And if it changes, we'll update it, but it's not got 50% bigger or anything like that.

So that's not really Hammerhead-specific. It's a game system that will be applicable to any ship that has multiple turrets and seats. It's not something that's coming with the Hammerhead in 3.3, but it will be something that, when it does come, will be incredibly useful for the Hammerhead, for people to target targets and share them between, for the pilot or captain to nominate things. I was actually looking at a video just before we came in here that Kirk had sent over on some turret stuff, and for the first time ever I actually noticed, and it's slightly related to the question, but only slightly, that on the self status on the HUD you can actually see the turrets rotating around. So that's something I hadn't noticed. I know it's been wanted for a long time. That helps a lot, especially for the pilot, to see where all these turrets are pointing. It's not where we want to leave it at. That's just a happy coincidence that's happened. We want to have proper feedback for those stations.

If they're all pointing in one direction, you can get a gist of where they're going and help them out.

As the pilot, you want to see your turrets' target pips, and the same for other seats.

It's all a matter of actually just getting it in and seeing if it fits. We have metrics that we work to, and that carries through to each ship. So we know how long the corridor can be with the pieces that we've got, and we just fit it in and then build bespoke pieces around that if we need to plug up any gaps. So it can be trial and error sometimes. You can plan it though, it's not too bad.

The concept for this was quite handy, because the concept artist who made it was given those pieces from those ships, so we had a fairly good idea what was going to work. But as I say, adding that second deck, we went through some curveballs to how stuff fits together that simply wasn't there in the concepts.

Yeah, you just have to get creative with it. That's what we have these jobs for. We have to solve those problems, and I think we've done a good job.

I'm not going to give any exact numbers, because I know we're balancing it literally at the moment.

Yeah, we're balancing it at the moment. I'd say it's around the Starfarer sort of speed and maneuverability.

Yeah, it's similar in size to the Starfarer.

It's not quite as boxy. It's flatter, but it's wider.

Yeah, so a little more agile than the Starfarer, a little faster.

But not greatly.

If we say the wrong number, then we're held to it.

I imagine a ship like that, game-balance-wise, is allowed to have a speed in that range not only because of its armor, but because with six turrets around the entire thing, you don't have to maneuver particularly fast. You can cover pretty much wherever you're trying to hit.

Every angle's got at least four or five turrets able to point that direction.

Yeah, just because it's slow doesn't mean it's not useful in this regard. Good luck getting close to it. Projectiles aren't slow.

It defends an area, and it does it well.

It can run six at once. I'm trying to remember whether it was this ship or another one that we talked about in the initial concept that was sort of borderline in its power consumption. At the moment, it does have laser repeaters on all the turrets, but if they need to change, because we don't want to have a repeat of the 600i situation where even doing basic maneuvers it struggled power-wise, then we will change the weapons first. So they are big guns. They do take a lot of energy, being laser weapons. So there are multiple ballistic options that we can put on it to alleviate that. The stats on the stats page are still correct to my knowledge. We've not decided to add an extra... It hasn't got big enough to warrant having extra power plants or shields chucked in it.

And of course, in the future, once the full breadth of Item 2.0 and the components is out, things like the power plants, you'll be able to upgrade, not necessarily the size, but the grade and type of power plants for these types of things. So you'll be able to tune aspects of the ship.

Yeah, you can overclock them. Now, with 3.3, you'll be able to overpower them, which is sort of like a light overclock. It's pushing it past 100%. So you get a little bit more power with a little bit of increased wear, whereas overclocking is all the power and all the wear.

And overclocking is for a very short amount of time.

Yeah, you don't want to be in that for a long period of time. So that's sort of the difficulty we had 10 months ago, that we didn't know how much of this would be in by the time it came out. So we always hedge our bets when we're discussing power consumption so far in advance. Especially as the numbers we have have changed a lot in the last few patches in terms of power and heat and all the balancing that's gone into that, which Adam has been part of as well. It's always very tricky to go, yes, it will work with five weapons, but the sixth one will push it over the limit. There's so many variables in our ships that it's very hard to do that on paper in advance.

And I don't think anyone's going to complain that, oh no, my Hammerhead can power all my laser repeaters now out of the box. It's something we noticed with the power tunings we did in the previous patch with the Sabre. It runs very close to its limit if you go all energy weapons on it. So there is a big tangible difference to running an all-ballistics loadout. You have so much reserve power left to be able to put into your shields, to be put into your thrusters, to be put into your coolers, that you've got the options there. And it only gets bigger with bigger ships.

The Sabre was really the odd one out when it came to balancing stuff like that. So much larger and more energy weapons than most other ships of its size.

More shields. Yeah, when we did that power change, there were three or four ships that were just so far out. They would not behave. Like the Glaive, with its size five guns on a relatively small ship as well.

Yeah, that's all it is. It comes from what actually needs to be inside the ship, doesn't it?

There's various levels of getting stuff bigger. Sometimes it's just filling the space more effectively. Other times it's, oh, we need to put a dog leg in this corridor, which means things need to go out. There's just a knock-on effect. There's very few times that we just simply scale up the ship. The only example I can think of is the Orion. We had the concept mesh. You look at the concept mesh and you think, well, that's fine. And when you actually went to start making it, because it didn't really detail the mechanics of the inside of it, it starts at the front where the big maw is to crunch all the rocks, and by the time they'd put the tube through the middle, there was about five meters around it to put everything else in. So we're like, oh, well, the design is fine, it's just the scale is completely off by the time you properly model the inside of it. So that one I think was literally 200%, and now everything's fine. They're not all like that.

Yeah, it is a unique problem to have it working from the inside all the way through to the outside, in multiple layers.

Some of it is just to make it look nicer. If we follow the concepts or the interior plan 100%, it sounds weird, but it often doesn't turn out how the concept looks, given that you're following it.

Yeah, because that concept is only from one or two angles, so you've got to take into account that it's a fully explorable area, and it needs to look good from every different angle, and sometimes that just means things have to change.

We know it's got the mess hall. We added that upstairs. It's got a bridge. It's got an engine room. It's got corridors.

Crew quarters.

Yeah, crew quarters.

There's a captain cabin.

Captain's quarters. There's multiple component rooms, one either side, isn't there?

There's a bathroom. Multiple bathrooms.

There's the captain's bathroom.

Captain's got his own quarters and his own bathroom.

And then there's two showers, two toilets.

And the observation area room above the cargo bay.

Yeah. And in the corridors, you've got the lift access for the crew as well.

You've got two lifts down to the ground.

A lot like the Retaliator lifts.

And then you've got two inside.

You've got one going down to the bridge and one going up.

Three inside, because there's one lift at the back.

The observation bit. So there's two lifts onto the second deck.

And they have ladders.

Oh, and airlocks and escape pods.

How many escape pods?

Eight.

Yeah, there was that question about missiles on the turrets. Can't do that. But they can fit those guns that have the huge exploding bullets. So give that a try.

Yeah, I'm always a sucker for putting Gatlings on everything, but a Hammerhead with ballistic scatterguns on every single turret will be a sight to behold. That's scary.

And I imagine if you put ballistic scatterguns on the turrets, that would save you a lot of power to pump into your shields.

Four different guns on each turret as well, if you're feeling really spicy.

Put four different ones on a single turret, chain the fire mode so it goes distortion first and energy and then ballistics. So the first two take down the shields.

I think it would be a good idea to have the top and bottom turrets be fully distortion and then offensive weapons on all the others. So you've got two guys focused on disabling ships.

Swiss Army knife of ships.