The developers tour the Origin 890 Jump: its redesigned exterior, size 4 turrets and point-defense AI blades, escape raft, atrium and spa deck, upper and battle bridges, medical bay, and EVA airlock. They also correct the cargo figure to about 484 SCU.
TL;DRThe ship's concept never really looked like the duck bill; the look changed during development as the front slope was altered and windows broke up the duck-face shape while exterior details were filled in.
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.
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.
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.
TL;DRA manned turret hides in that hatch, and damage output isn't being changed now because defense is the ship's strength, though it will be adjusted if it underperforms and remote turrets may later be automated.
Yep, so there's a manned turret in that hatch. So that's packing two size fours currently, same as the original concept brochure had. I know there's been a lot of debate about the sort of damage output of this ship and its place against other ships. And it's something we're looking at. We're not going to immediately make any changes because this is really the big bonus this ship has, its defensive capabilities. It's our first sort of capital class ship. It's our first ship with a lot of size 4 items, size 4 shields. So it can really take a pounding to offset some of the ships that may pack slightly more punch on paper. So we're not going to change anything at the moment. But if in the future it is underperforming, then like any ship, we will make changes to put it into the place it's supposed to be. There's a manned turret at the front there. You saw two of those remote missile turrets outside the bridge. So currently any of these remote turrets, they have to be manned purely because we don't have fully automated or point defense turrets in game and used at the moment. But in the future, these will become automated if you wish, or you can still retain manual control over them. So there's two remote ones there. Then there's a remote one at the top back, I believe.
Yes. And for ships like this, especially ones that we had said come with point defense, a point defense turret is essentially just a pre-equipped AI blade on a remote turret.
I don't think there was ever a concept image done that showed it in great detail. We had the original concept mesh, but that was very much the old Origin styling with the very circular style engines. This is one of the first things that changed when we put this into proper production.
[It] would be symmetrical like this. You're just trying to not add a little face to it, because once you see that face in it, you can't unsee it. So it went through a couple of iterations to try and avoid that. But I think it looks pretty cool now.
TL;DRThe escape raft holds ten, with dimensions close to a cargo transport's passenger pod, and is cramped but meant to give upper-deck luxury guests more space than individual crew escape pods.
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 not the case. Big space stations in the future will have extra large hangars, so you'll be able to spawn it there. And then when we have docking, you'll be able to connect to it from docking collars. So if you're docked to a station, this would be your way on from the station.
EVA suits, being an airlock going to the outside, because you're not always going to be using this just to transition onto a space station or whatever. You may be going outside to do repairs and take an EVA. So yeah, suits in those.
You will suffocate if you take your helmet off and go under the water. But you've obviously got a helmet on, so you're fine. And then when swimming comes online, you would be actually able to properly swim in that. We thought it would be a bit harsh if we treated it the same as the water on Hurston. Death pool.
These bathrooms were the cause of some drama. And I even saw it on the patch notes. I think on Spectrum and Reddit, there was great discussion over what we meant by scaling down the bathrooms. So people were thinking that we were cutting out bathrooms and people were losing out on their luxury by having less bathroom. There was just a comically over-scaled bathroom in these.
TL;DRThe battle bridge mirrors the top bridge's functions at lower priority, but for the initial release it can only fly in third person, with a remote camera view planned for later.
It's the battle bridge. So this mirrors all the functionality of the top bridge. Priority-wise, it has lower priority currently than the upper bridge. So anyone sat on the upper bridge will have priority. But obviously, if you want to come down here, there's probably a reason why you don't want to be stood in the upper deck. But you will eventually have exactly the same functionality as you do on the top bridge. So you can actually fly the ship from down here. Obviously, you'll notice the number one problem is you can't see from down here. At the moment, we don't have the ability to have a remote camera like we have for turrets and retain flight control. We will have that in the future, but for the initial release, that's not there. Unfortunately, the only way you can fly from down here is in third person, but you can fly, and I've seen QA trying to fly the ship in third person from down here, doing some impromptu multi-crew, calling out from other people dotted around the ship.
You'll be able to fly and manage the ship exactly as you could on the upper deck from down there. And those two front ones again have control over the remote turrets. So if you fully crewed this with all humans, you could have two people down there, two people up on the upper bridge, and they would each be able to have their own remote turrets to control.
Obviously a ship this size is probably going to have some medical issues at some point. So this is one of the higher tier, or lower tier, I can't remember which way the numbers go. But it's more than the basic. So not quite an Apollo, but more than a... Yeah, it's less than a full planetside one, which is primarily where you'd be respawning at when you actually die or need major surgery. But it's more than just basic injuries.
TL;DRCargo capacity is just under 500 SCU, not the website's 1600, which was an old freight-unit figure that wouldn't fit the ship, and older ships may see similar adjustments when put into production.
Cargo capacity. I think it's probably the number one thing that people ask me. So this is just under 500 SCU. It's like 484 or something like that. Obviously that is not 1600, like the website says.
That was done before SCU. That 1600 was the original freight units. And then when we did the post to convert to SCU, we actually listed it as 1600 again, incorrectly. And when we came to make this ship, with all the other ships that we have now, putting 1600 SCU of cargo in a ship this size wouldn't have fit with all this other stuff in here. When you see this thing fully stacked with cargo, there's 400-odd that goes on that rear cargo lift, and then there's more in the front hangar. Being able to fit 1,600 probably would have required the entire lower deck to be purely cargo. And that was just a lot for how all the ships are going to perform their roles. Just less than 500 is not an insignificant amount of cargo. And the sort of cargo this is going to be carrying, it's going to be valuable.
And when I first started, it was actually in cubic meters as well. So we've changed it quite a lot over the years. And there will probably be more ships, like the older ships, that when they get put into production, they will have some adjustments done to them. It's not intentional nerfing of ships. It's putting them into the role that they need to be alongside everything else. So it may seem like, oh, we've chopped it in half, but actually relative to the other ships in the game, they fit where they should.