The developers explain the Crusader Mercury Star Runner's hidden shielded smuggling compartments (about 1 SCU each, three in total), scan evasion, and AI guard searches. They also cover its 96 SCU cargo bay, data running and encryption, small weapon hardpoints, the holo-chess table and vehicle capacity.
Yeah, they're pressurized. You could smuggle a willing person in there. They're at an SCU metric, so you're going to have to encourage them into various shapes to get in there. But it is pressurized. It does have atmosphere. It's not comfortable. Technically, yes.
TL;DRSarah McCulloch describes the compartments as lock boxes for contraband and treasure that also work as bait for trapping people, though they weren't designed specifically for trapping.
The compartments are mainly for if you've got contraband. I see them as lock boxes. So I can imagine they would have some sort of lock system on them, and maybe you could grab them or even break into them or something like that. So that's the way that I saw them, because it was something that I really wanted with the ship. It was this cool little hidden section where you could go and find this almost like treasure. And also, as I say, just hide whatever you wanted or what you thought was precious, and it also coaxes people down into there and you can trap them, essentially.
Is that what those compartments were designed for originally? Trap?
Not specifically for trapping people. No, but it's just a part of the element that, because you have to go down there, that is that aspect now. It's kind of like bait. That's what I see them as, as well. It's very tempting to go in there. There's always the element of, as I say, getting trapped down there.
TL;DRThe compartments are separate mini cargo grids with their own component access, not registered on the main manifest, and the team wants smugglers to upgrade their shielding against scanners and customs inspections.
There is separate component access down there. They don't share the same space, so it's not an either-or. They are essentially their own little mini cargo grids, so you have your main cargo section. That's your manifested, legitimate cargo. These aren't registered specifically on that, so when you scan the ship, that cargo grid, the big cargo grid, is what gets scanned first. And then all these other things are just, if you've got a really good scanner or you're going to spend the time scanning, you'll probably find them, but you're not going to know what they are.
And we really want to also offer the smuggler the possibility to upgrade the shielding on those compartments. So the more you advance in the game, you'll be able to probably afford better shielding for these, which means less chances of getting discovered, which will automatically get you trying to do more risky stuff where people have a better scanner, and it's a constant race of how you shield versus how you get scanned, and it will be up to you to make sure you don't get discovered. One of the ideas that we had when we were talking to Chris was that once you land, there will be customs inspections. Think about it, again, the famous Millennium Falcon landing, and you do get the stormtroopers doing a customs tour through it, trying to figure out, hey, is there something hidden here? You might have it there, they might find it, they might not, based on how good your shielding is. You might have someone hidden there that basically, as the guards come this way, they go down and they come behind the guards and run out, and they're never discovered. It's all up to you guys and your imagination, what the limits are, basically. And about what you were saying about this not being designed for certain things: sometimes we don't like it when people do crazy things, but in general we like it when you guys discover new things that maybe we didn't think about, and then we can expand on those and make the game better, because there's a new type of gameplay now.
TL;DRDan Trufin says shielded compartments give a fairly high chance of avoiding detection, depending on scanner quality and distance, and he advises smuggling small, valuable loads hidden among legitimate cargo rather than filling every spot.
So hiding your smuggling compartment, I mean, it's going to be shielded. So the chances depend on how close the scanning ship is and how good they are, how good their scanner is. So you will have a fairly high chance of not getting whatever's put in those compartments discovered. So you might have big boxes of potatoes in your cargo, but in a small compartment, hidden underneath, in a shielded compartment, you're carrying drugs. Now, the more potatoes you have, the higher the chances they won't find the drugs. If you're only carrying the drugs, and that's the only thing to scan, and the guy comes really close to you and you let him do that, yes, they will find you. Again, if you're trying to constantly avoid customs and obviously constantly outrun them, they might figure out something's wrong and they might stop you. They might order you to stop or get shot. And then you might get boarded, they might come on board, and the same operation happens where you might get someone to come downstairs, pick up the drugs from this location and hide them in a different one. Because the customs will come because they detected them in this location, and we try to make the ship in such a way where all these passages allow you this gameplay of, if the guard comes from here, I can come in here and exit on the other side, and it has these loops. There's quite a few, I can't remember specifically how many of these smuggling spots there are, but you don't have to fill them all. If you fill them all, as soon as someone goes down there, they're going to find it and go, well, they're obviously doing something. If you just fill one of them, they can go down. They could spend five minutes going around there and not find anything, and they will give up eventually. So yeah, it's good to smuggle something small, very valuable, rather than a lot of stuff that's medium value.
TL;DRThe listed cargo figure covers only the rear cargo bay, and the smuggling space is three roughly one-by-one compartments, which is optional storage on a cargo and data ship, not a dedicated smuggling ship.
When the stats page goes up, because everybody likes the stats, do the stats include the smuggling space?
No. The stats on the stats page are going to say 96 SCU. That is just for the rear cargo bay. It does not include the smuggling.
It's about the size of one by one, so it's wherever you can, and there's three of them, because, what Dan was saying, when you go down into the cargo, one of the vents is literally a dead end, so you have to go and find this smuggled way. But yeah, it's about one by one size, so there's three of them, and then it's just whatever you fit inside this.
It's not a big smuggling ship. It's a cargo ship and a data runner that you can do a little bit of smuggling with if you so choose. It's not the be-all and end-all of smuggling ships.
Yeah, you've got an option to be naughty if you want to, basically.
Yeah, because a manufacturer wouldn't outright make a smuggling ship. That's what Drake gets accused of doing all the time.
It's optional storage.
TL;DRJohn Crewe says the hardpoints are intentionally small because the ship isn't designed to fight and relies on speed and agility, unlike a better-armed ship in its size class.
Yeah, they are intentionally small because it's not designed to fight. Not every ship is a dogfighter in the game, as much as everyone wants their ship to be the best dogfighter. This is, compared to the other ships in its size class, so like the Freelancer, Constellation, one of the fastest ones amongst them. So it relies on its speed and agility, not being able to shoot its way out of the situation like the Constellation can with its size five mounts and a million missiles on it.
One of the things that the Constellation gets referred to as is space superiority, since it's meant to be a step above others in that class.
The Freelancer is a good comparison. It has 66 SCU, so it's got less cargo. It's got better guns, got better armor. The Freelancer MAX has got more cargo than this, same guns. So if you want to just do cargo running, day in, day out, the Freelancer MAX is good. If you want to mix it up, that's good.
TL;DRShip designers work from a rough shared idea of planned gameplay to set metrics and build in swappable space, so ships rarely need rebuilding when systems are finished later, as with a mining ship.
Yeah, this is one of the things that's always between the ship pipeline and the system designers. Generally, they get to be a lot faster than we are, and that's when we get into situations like you mentioned. But we tend to, even if we're not ready with a full finished system, tested and fun to play, we still have a pretty rough idea of how we want the gameplay to be. So there are systems that we have not written parts of the code for yet. But we know, yeah, it's going to work like this, like this, like this. And everyone kind of agrees, yeah, that makes perfect sense, and it's a good idea that we will implement in the future. We know it's coming. So we can start establishing metrics for all these boxes, and we can start figuring out what distances we want certain types of gameplay to happen at, and then they can start: okay, we need these distances in the ship, we need that much space for certain cargo or data storage, and then they can start building accordingly. Yeah, it's a tough one, and I wish we had a bit more resources to start making the gameplay and testing it and it being fun and then doing this part, but since this is the resources we have, we go ahead and we try to make it as close as possible. There obviously are adjustments. It doesn't stay as we originally thought, but we're getting pretty good at making estimations and getting as close to final even before the systems get tested. A very good example of this was the mining ship, the Prospector. So the ship was pretty much completed way before we had even a line of code written for mining. We experimented with it, and there were a few adjustments that we had to do in how the mining arm functions and where you can point it and stuff like this. But eventually the ship pretty much stayed the same. We're talking a 1% change in the ship compared to rebuilding the entire ship from scratch, which is what we don't want to do, obviously.
When we're in that situation where the ship is quite far ahead of perhaps the full implementation of something, we spend a lot of time between Todd, Dan, Tony, Chris, hours and hours of meetings, to just flesh out that design in our heads and go, right, we could go this way with it, we could go that way with it, we could go this way with it. But they all have these common points in the design. So for the ship side, we'll build around those common points. And if it's something that is like, well, we'll go with that for now, but it might have to change from a machine that does this to a machine that functions like that, we'll make that room in the ship easily enough to be swapped out one for another, so we don't have to rebuild. We very rarely try and build a ship around a single feature that is so unknown that it could result in the entire ship being wasted. So we always try, and we do a lot of design prep work, and then we try and sort of bank areas where we can, just to future-proof it.
TL;DRThe chessboard table is a break-room holo chess game that also hides an escape route into the ventilation, and John Crewe confirms only a playable something that might look like chess, not an exact recreation.
Well, I wanted to obviously have a break room in this ship. I wanted some sort of elements of just, you're sitting off and you're relaxing and playing some chess. And we were just thinking of this holo chess. And as I say, Chris actually mentioned having this holo chess as well. So we were talking backwards and forwards about it. This is how it came up: we could implement this little holo chess game that you can just sit off with your friends and play a game of chess. The actual holo button in the middle, once pressed, goes into the floor and then splits in half, and then you see the ventilation system underneath, which you can then escape into. So it's kind of like a multi-functional table, really. So not only is this a cool little bit of chess that you can chill out with your friends with, but it also gives you a bit of an escape point as well, which is what Chris wanted, and I thought it was really cool. It's that bit where, as I say, again to reference the Millennium Falcon, it just goes down to fix the hyperdrive. It was just that little element, and you get to see all the guts of the ship as well, which is cool.
When we do ship concepts, we have multiple gate reviews to get all the departments that are working on, or are going to work on, this ship to sign off on it, so nothing crazy comes from art, like, oh, this ship's going to be all tank treads so it can roll in any direction, and animation go mad. And as soon as we saw that chess table come up, we were like, that's going to be one of the questions. If it's not in the Q&A, someone's going to ask us that. And Chris talked at great length about how, when you're doing these huge quantum travels, you saw it at CitizenCon last year, where we did the quantum travel from ArcCorp to Hurston, how long that was. That was enough time to put another demo inside that quantum travel. And that was just two planets in the same system. Chris wants all these little mini games for you to do to pass the time, because there's big amounts of time that you're going to spend just in quantum travel, and you're probably not going to want to sit in your pilot seat for that entire time, just sitting there going, oh, I might just sit here just in case I get interdicted. You're going to want to get out of your seat and go do stuff around your ship. So all these little mini features are things that he wants to have just there for you to pass the time with.
So is that you confirming that we're actually going to have a playable chess game?
I'm confirming you're going to have a playable something. Might look like chess. Can't guarantee it will be a one-to-one recreation of chess.
Okay, the smuggler compartment: it will be up to you what smuggler compartment you get there. And if you get one that has extra locking security, yes, it will be harder to open. Eventually, if the guy is good enough at hacking, there will be a hacking mini game through which you can open doors, locks, any kind of security. Now, if you're talking about the big cargo that you can carry in the back, that is just exposed, and people can just pick it up.
TL;DRJohn Crewe says any ship can send data to another, but big data-focused ships do it far better, encryption needs matching hardware on both ends, and whether the Carrack has it is too early to say.
Okay, so essentially any ship can send data to another ship. It might be at a very basic level, and you can send all the data that you have to another ship. You can share coordinates, share discoveries, whatever, but it's going to take a while if you're sending it between an Argo and a... They're not designed for that sort of communication. These ships, the Herald, the Mercury, any of the big cap ships that focus on data, they're designed for... it's like bandwidth: rather than having a 56k modem sending stuff, you've got fiber. So they can send it a lot better. Encryption is sort of locked to specific hardware in the ship, so if your ship has it, you can encrypt it. The ship at the other end will need the equivalent hardware to do that. Not all of them have it. Whether the Carrack has it, too early to say.
Yeah, no, I mean, if that ever happens, we don't have it planned yet, but if that ever happens, it will be a thing that's not specific to the Mercury. It has to be something that not each ship can do, but each ship equipped with a certain device will be able to clamp to other ships. But nothing yet. Sorry.
TL;DRThe AI will play somewhat dumb, with guards knowing only some of the hiding spots, so players must judge how experienced the guard is and move cargo, bribe, or run if needed.
So regarding the AI being programmed to search this, we're going to have to have the AI play a bit dumb, as a stormtrooper is, more or less. There will be a series of places to hide. You might get a stormtrooper that knows one out of three, one out of four, two out of three, something like this. You might get the super smart stormtrooper that knows all of them. And that's when you have to move your cargo while they're trying to get to it. So it's up to you to kind of figure out who you're dealing with, how experienced they are. Are they like a stormtrooper captain? Then you might want to manually move your stuff. If they're a grunt soldier, then maybe it's enough. You risk it. It might be that they know exactly the one that you're going for. One thing that might decide the place they search is scanning. If their scanner says, here is something hidden, they will search that. But they might not find the other hidden spots. So it's up to you to figure out, oh, they're going for that one, quickly move it to that one. And hopefully they only check one of them and you're free. If they check all of them, then you better carry it and run with it and hope they don't see you.
It's one of the persistent challenges in the development of a game of this size and scope: our desire to make it as immersive and as diegetic to our real-world experience as possible, but at the same time to pull some things back a little bit, because this is a video game and you need to...
There's a level of suspension of disbelief.
Exactly. So this is one of those things that falls right in that kind of gray area between those two.
One other thing would be, let's say you do get discovered and it's Mr. Super Captain that knows the layout of every ship. You might be able to bribe him. So there are other options. You might be able to shoot him in the head and run away. Make a run for it. That is an option. That's why we like to open up all these avenues, and you guys choose the one you want. Each of them will have risks and consequences, so you have to choose wisely.
TL;DRPlayers can scan other players and, if stealthy, intercept a data transmission such as a mining-field discovery and sell it on; the answer doesn't address incentives for storing data.
Players, provided they're somewhat competent, should always be more than a match for NPCs. You can always hire... AI can just go beyond what players can do if we wanted to. But that's a big level investment in terms of hiring people or bribing people on the other end of it to sort of offset that. I don't know where I'm going now.
Also, I think what you're asking there is, will you be able to acquire data from another player, as in scan them and find out where their weaknesses are? Yes. So let's say you get someone who's trying to send a transmission. He just found the richest mining field in the history of the UEE, and he's trying to sell the data to another guy. They're starting the data transmission. If you are there, you're stealthy, no one notices you, you might be able to acquire the same transmission, the same data, and sell it to someone else.
TL;DROfficially the compartments are for storing spare parts like coolers and power plants without using cargo space; on this ship they are simply more shielded than the closets on other ships.
Officially, they're a great place to store spare items. So every ship needs storage. If you're going on a long trip, your items are going to be wearing out, so you might want to have spare items: coolers, your power plants. You've got sub-items, fuses, whatever. These things are all going to slowly decay over time, and you don't want them to take up your cargo space. You don't want to fill your cargo space with all the stuff you need to get there. So lots of ships actually have these extra areas. The Hammerhead and the Idris is a good one. We have these in the big circular corridors. You see in the Aegis ships, they've got these doors that go like that. They go into essentially store cupboards, where it's just racks of storage space for storing stuff. It's technically a cargo grid, but it's not a cargo grid for storing cargo on. If you went to buy cargo, it wouldn't go in there. It's for you to put these spares in. The difference on the Star Runner is they are more shielded than, say, on a Hammerhead, where they're just a closet to put stuff in. So that's why they're there.
Probably not, unless it's in the instance where we provide multiple room options for a ship.
Maybe something like the Retaliator that had multiple internal rooms.
Yeah, a modular room system is something we would use to do this, because whilst people think, oh, it's just adding a 1.25 meter cube into a wall, there is a lot more work that has to be done to do that. You're essentially doubling the art costs, doubling the time, doubling the testing, doubling performance and space on your disk for this sort of stuff. So if we want that behavior in the ship, we will have built it in from the start or provided a swappable room for that. So if your ship doesn't have a swappable room or we've not set it, it's probably not going to have that sort of functionality.
Some ships, like I said, the bigger ships where you're going to be out spending lots of time, are going to have these areas for storing stuff in. What you put in them is up to you. But they might not all be suitable for putting crates of WiDoW in, or whatever.
TL;DRThey definitely want crates that disguise their contents, which is an easy win since the crate exists, but an onboard customs inspection of an open cargo hold would still find the goods.
One of the talking points that has been a part of Star Citizen's development almost from the very beginning, these were in early conversations back in the old Wingman's Hangar days, was the ability to have cargo crates that themselves could obscure what was inside. In the example he's using with the Covalex story, the crate looks like toxic waste, so nobody would think to look inside it, but inside is not actually toxic waste, it's something else.
So we definitely want to do this. It's an easy win for us, because the crate is already done. We just need to take the functionality that we built for these boxes and move it into this, which is not that much of a big deal. But what you have to remember is, if you have customs coming onto your ship and your cargo hold is this room, they're going to find it. When they scan your ship from a distance, the chances are they might not find it, but if you actually get an inspection on board, you better have a proper smuggling ship with proper hiding places. It's like smuggling light. There has to be a downside. It's the cheaper version.
When the Hull C was first introduced, one of the tenets was that you could get cargo crates that would appear to be one thing but actually house another thing inside them. Even a ship like the Hull C that stores its cargo on the outside for all to see could actually still be used for the purposes of smuggling.
TL;DRSarah McCulloch drew on Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stealth bombers, the Normandy, the Tempest and Wipeout, keeping a big reference board and spaceship models around her.
Well, I've always been a really huge fan of Battlestar Galactica, so I actually looked at a few of those ships as well in terms of the detailing, and also Star Trek as well, because the Enterprise is quite smooth and things like that. I was looking at all of these and also the stealth bombers that the military use as well. So I have a big, massive reference board on my PC that I just grab all these images from and just put them over there. And as I say, I just had that. And we also had the model as well... well, actually I have the SR-2 Normandy as well on my desk, which is again another huge inspiration. The Tempest as well I have. I just like to surround myself with spaceships. And also, as I say, I was a huge fan of Wipeout back in the day as well, so I looked at all of them, and I just like to surround myself as much as possible with sci-fi and military goodness.
Yeah, it was just something I always wanted to do when I grew up, was make spaceships. And especially when I was making this, all the ships that I grew up with have hugely influenced me throughout my entire life. So it's really cool to actually get to be able to make them now, and it's fab.
TL;DRDecoy devices could waste guards' search time so they give up, depending on AI configuration, but they would be costly, probably single-use, and a deliberate risk-reward gamble.
Yes, lure them in and trap them.
So I see this working very well, where you would basically waste their time and they would give up at some point. It depends on how we configure our AI. Let's say they have to do three searches in three random spots. If two of those searches happen to be a decoy, as in you take a crate of bananas, potatoes are exhausted now, so you take a crate of bananas, put one of these decoys inside, and it looks like you have something there. If they waste time there, they probably won't bother to finish the rest of the ship, and they'll go, ah, we give up, we go out. But that will be costly. You will have to purchase one of these devices. It will probably be a one-use-only device. It won't run forever, so that you can use it every time you get an inspection. So you will have to put it there before you get an inspection, so you might use it and you don't get an inspection, and you wasted the device. So there will be risk-reward. We always want to introduce this risk-reward thing. I know you guys like to get something for free, but it's always a lot more enticing if you might lose it. Then it's like, do I get it? Do I not get it? Do I get caught? Do I not get caught? So there needs to be a risk.
TL;DRYes, you can land outside the city and sneak in through more lax outskirts entrances, but avoiding guards depends on your skill, and other players may be waiting to catch you.
Yes, yes and no, actually. Yes, you'll be able to do it, but avoiding guards is a matter of your own skill. It doesn't come free. You better be good at it. I'll give you an example of how we're kind of building Lorville right now. There's a main customs security checkpoint. It's very, very hard to pass something illegal through there. You better have either good luck or state-of-the-art equipment. Very hard. But if you want to do it, you can always come in through the outskirts. You land on the planet, you take a vehicle all the way to the outskirts entrances. There is security, but they're a bit more lax. You don't have to go through all the x-ray scanners and all this stuff. So there are guys patrolling with a handheld scanner. If they see you and they scan you, they'll probably get you. But if you manage to avoid them or find another way in, then you're good to go. But again, if you find another way in, let's say there's a service hatch open at a certain time of day and you go through it and you bypass the security, consider the fact that other people might have found it, and they're waiting for you to see what you're bringing through there. So there's, again, risk-reward. And if you're good at it, you get the reward. If you're not, sorry.
For every player that's out there that wants to do all this smuggling, there's another one that wants to be the person to stop you doing that. And they're going to be learning the same tricks as you are.
I'm very familiar with Crusader Industries' marketing department, and they're wonderful people. Wonderful people, and I think they'll be just fine.
It's a cargo running and data running ship. Those are its primary functions.
Crusader has only introduced three ships that we know of to the Star Citizen community: the original Genesis Starliner, the recent Hercules Starlifter, and now the Star Runner.
The Starlifter and the Starliner are pretty above-board ships, not for the criminal element.
You could have a Starlifter and just fill it full of drugs if you wanted to. It would be a pretty good drug ship.
But no, I think their rep's probably OK. But we'll see what happens with the next couple of ships they introduce.
TL;DRThe ship is meant for three crew but can be run solo or multi-crew; solo is less efficient in trouble, while a crew is stronger but must split the gains.
Well, you need at least one Tavar and co-pilot. So there's three people that run it. So you've got obviously your pilot, co-pilot, and then obviously whoever's doing your maintenance and making sure that all your goods are getting hidden and distributed around the ship correctly. You can also trick someone as well, because they might not necessarily think that there's three people aboard, and there's someone just waiting in the ventilation system, moving stuff about. And you can be like, oh, no, well, there's only me and my co-pilot on the ship, but they haven't declared this third person that's also aboard the ship. But you can have up to three people on the ship, so you can trick people.
But that being said, if you want to run it on your own, you can do it. If you get into trouble, you're probably not going to be that efficient. But, I mean, there's power in numbers. Again, one can hide the cargo, one can take the co-pilots, one can shoot the turrets, one can fly. It's better if there's more people, but then again you have to split the gains, which is always a problem. But yeah, I see benefits of both. You can do solo, you can do multi-crew.
Okay, so it does have a cargo ramp on the back. It's such a pleasant angle for driving, unlike some ships, so you'll be able to get the bikes in, so your Dragonflies, Noxes, X1s, those all go in. Pretty sure the Greycat goes in there. The Greycat loves going in ships like this. It's not big enough for the Cyclone or the Rover. So the Greycat PTV is sort of your maximum comfortable size to get anything in, in terms of width and height. Bikes, no problem.
Data-wise, it's got the same sort of technology as the Herald has, so you've got your one button to wipe everything. Cargo, well, the main cargo bay is just a normal cargo bay, and there aren't any special chutes unless you've snuck some in.
No, no sneaky chute.
That's all ships.
So that wouldn't be unique to the Star Runner?
No. Pretty much all of them have pressurized cargo bays. Provided you've got a door between you and the cargo bay, you will be able to open that back door, it's going to depressurize, turn off the power on the grid, and all that cargo is loose.
When is that happening? Because I want to see the first person killed by depressurized cargo.
I think we actually showed a video of it, a work-in-progress one.
Yeah, we showed a work in progress on RTV a couple weeks ago when Chris was on.
TL;DRParts are figured out: data is acquired by scanning, stored physically on computers where power loss means data loss, and passed on by docking or ship-to-ship transfer, not just dumped into a box.
So there's a lot behind that question. There are parts that are figured out. It's not about taking data and here's your data. So you will have ways to acquire data. Let's say you're a science vessel that is scanning a moon and getting data about that moon, or scanning a nebula, getting data about that. You will acquire that data through scanning. How you transport it, yes, it's kind of physical, because you have your computers that are storing it. If power drops, you lose your data. So if you get attacked, there's a risk there in transporting the data. And then how you pass it on: you either land and download the data in the station to whoever wants to buy it, or you transfer it to others, might be NPCs that want to meet with you in a shady corner of the universe to transfer data to them. Might be a trap, might not. But yeah, so there are ways to transfer between ships, as we said before, and you will acquire it generally, but not always, from a distance. But you will not go like, I'm gathering data and I'm dumping it in this box. It's a bit more sophisticated. I mean, even now we still have a phone, we take a picture.