Star Citizen Live: All About Spaceships

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's no one thing. There isn't a single defining feature that goes, this makes this thing a military ship. It's a combination. So let's talk about the gameplay side first. Traditionally, they are obviously more military-minded, clue's in the name, so they tend to be more focused on offensive firepower than the equivalent civilian ships, so they might have more guns, they might have a larger size of guns. The good example we have is the F7A Mark II Hornet, which is in Squadron. That is, on the face of it, a snazzier, sharper looking Hornet. But actually, all of its weapon mounts are plus one size. So it absolutely rinses through targets. And then you also have the defensive side. So they might be more armored. They might have more countermeasures. Again, they're designed to be used in military operations where you are expected to be both attacking and being attacked. So they're geared for that. On the lore side, and maybe a little on the actual art side, military ships in the real world now have very different things to... we'll use ships as the analogy. On a military ship, you would have the captain's quarters and the XO's quarters and a brig. You're probably not going to have a brig on a civilian cargo hauler because that's not what civilians do. So the facilities on board are different. They will bring gameplay in the future. But it's that combination of stats, role, their usage, and what is inside them, essentially.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I think from a visual point of view, John's already touched on it, but with the military stuff, a lot of the functionality is what drives the visuals a little bit more than with civilian stuff, where we can take a few more freedoms in terms of the stylings. And obviously, each manufacturer still has their particular stylings, but we have manufacturers that make all sorts of ships. But I think the thing for it is that we always try and put the functionality as a higher priority, for things like, okay, it'd be great if we could move this room here because it feels a bit nicer to walk around, but you've got to think, well, actually, what does that mean if you've got people that are in crew quarters and they need to get to their positions quickly and that sort of stuff. So I guess a little bit more thought goes into that side of things.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

A good example of where some of the lines can get a bit blurred as well is the Carrack. In lore, that was originally the military, I don't know if it was the Explorer, it was the advanced scout forward base thing, but the one you have is the ex-military stock, so it still has those military features on board but it's used for civilian purposes. So it does have that dedicated captain's quarters, but the crew are all in a big bunk room with shared facilities, whereas if you look at some of the more civilian ships, everyone has individual quarters, because you're not in the military, you're not conditioned to bunking with your entire crew. You want your own little bit of space, your own facilities on board that you can just tuck away in yourself.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's something we definitely want to do, but I'm not in a position to give any specifics at this time. It's certainly something that we are looking into.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I think from my point of view, quite a lot of work went into some of the setup on the Nova. A lot of work went into the tank treads, and it'd be great to not just have that done for one ship and to be able to build on that. I think there's loads of exciting stuff we can do. When you see a lot of our ground vehicles working and working well, it inspires you to do more. I like ground vehicles anyway. And I know a lot of the team, they're a lot of fun to work on.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Like Ben said, though, we don't want to just do work for... like, we've done the Nova Tank, that's going to be the only vehicle in the game that's ever going to have tank treads. We want to have some use out of it. I think if you even look at the old Nova Tank concepts, there was a hover version in there originally, which would use our existing grav-lev. So Ben's eyes go very wide there. So there's certainly lots of options we can pursue.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

And I think, as we were producing the tank, even in our review meetings and things, a lot of ideas were thrown around like, oh, it'd be great if we could do X and great if we could do Y. And it's like, yeah, it would be. Absolutely.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think the only aspect of that that I can touch on in my role is the factor of it. From a design and gameplay experience side, it's not something that we factor in, because if we take the current scenario now, imagine the world where we'd released a ship that there were only 50 of ever created. From a gameplay side, we have to consider the scenario that all 50 of those would turn up in the server right now today and not destroy everything and have an equal and enjoyable experience. So from my side, the gameplay side, the rarity of them is not a factor. We have to consider those sort of scenarios.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We obviously have a lot of military ships in the game. It's one of the questions that people ask me quite a lot: why do we have so many combat ships? And they are popular things and people enjoy playing them. But in terms of stuff that's missing, there are a few gaps that are less populated than we'd like, because we want to provide choice for players when they're playing a game. And if you've only got one ship of that type, then that's no choice. A good example would be the Nautilus. That's quite a niche military role in being a minelayer. And we only have this very large ship capable of deploying one size of mine. So there was naturally an opportunity there to expand that in sizes each way. We could do a much larger one. We could do a much smaller one, or something to do with the actual mines themselves.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I quite like the smaller ships. I think I enjoy the challenge of trying to get all the functionality and features we need into a nice small package. So I think doing a little single-seater reconnaissance vehicle, something that isn't necessarily armed to the teeth, but you can just get in and get out, I think it would be quite fun. Military Merlin.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I'm not a lore person, so I don't even know what the Banu do in terms of military for classification, but it is more a civilian thing. Therefore, I can't talk about it on this show.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

If you slave it, like any other turret, any other remote turret, it would be the same functionality. So if the pilot chooses to do that, if they want to solo it, then it would be slaved and it would be locked in the upper position in a forward arc where you can look, which is pretty much the consistent rule for all scenarios like that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think more Starfury.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

At first glance, it is very X-Wingy, and then you notice the differences in the swept wings and just the angles. It's not quite as much as it seems at first glance.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We have a lot of ships in lore that vary from quite in-depth explanations on the Galactapedia to just one-line mentions in sales text or one line in a lore piece somewhere. And whilst we do have a lot of ships, we're not going to make every single ship that has ever been mentioned in lore. So first and foremost, we'll do the Starliner as was promised. And then after we've done that, we can always look at actual variants for it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I really like the Crusader stuff. So I can poke John a bit about it, see what we can do when we come to tackle it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It'll be the only one left after the end of this year, the Crusader ones.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, no, there's still the Ares.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The end of this year. I think it's on the roadmap. I hope it's on the roadmap. If not, well, there's your spoilers.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It is on the roadmap. You're covered.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

To be honest, we'll have to have a discussion about it when we get to it. Just because, take RSI for example, we have RSI ships that look very different compared to what we've done with the Scorpius. And I think it's fine, in a universe with all these manufacturers in it, to have different ages of the same manufacturer. You look at 1980 Fords versus Fords today, and that's in a relatively short period of time that they've been making their cars. I don't want to be in a position where all of our ships look...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Like variants of each other.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

Yeah, exactly. But I do think it's really important that we have common language and the core elements of the design language for a particular manufacturer. You want to be able to walk onto a ship and know who made it, right from the start, if you know what I mean. And I'd rather focus on that side of things than making things always feel like just a variant of the same thing: pulled out a bit, the wings made a bit wider, stick a lot more seats in it and job done.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So I'll give the other popular answer of: it is not in active development right now, as of this second as I talk. But we have done a complete concept update pass on it. So when it is ready to go into production, it is all there, we've worked out all the corridors and rooms, they've been brought up to modern standards for all the metrics, all the usables. We've pulled in a lot of reference from the Bengal interior into it, so it's all the RSI interiors. The Mantis took inspiration from the Connie, and you can see it, but they're not the same, and it's similar between RSI's larger capital ships, Bengal and Polaris, and between those two, the Mantis and Constellation. And the other big change on the Polaris is it did get a bit bigger, as all things do, but the trade-off for that is now the hangar is to the standardized metric for the fighter size class that it's supposed to hold, so it's not the very weird size that it was. It is a standard... I always forget what the player-facing category is, but internally, dev side, it's an extra small one. So that's your Gladiuses, Sabres. They will all fit in there. And a Scorpius.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So the Scorpius will fit inside the hangar.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

In its folded wings-back position. I mean, it will fit in if you put it the other way. You just might not have your wings left. I know what people are like.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Not a huge amount. It's still a thing. It's still primarily going to be used for Squadron, but it's not in Episode 1, so there's no active movement on it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes, we have considered it, is the short answer.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I'd say I like ground vehicles.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The jump antennas will be there when we have jump points. The shutters, I think when we did the model of it, we left them off because we weren't quite sure how we wanted to do them. We modeled them out, proved it out in concept, but we never transitioned that to actual in-game. And we have been doing some performance work on the Carrack, which maybe Ben can talk about, what and why we were doing it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I think part of what we were talking about before, we have times between ships, and we decided to put a bit more of a focus onto looking at our ships and our processes, working with the graphics team and the rendering team to see what performance costs we can save. In our game, like John's mentioned, there can be points where you could have a large number of the same ship turning up, or you might have a number of completely varied ships turning up into one player space. And what we're finding is that whilst our ships were OK when you were up close and personal with them, when they were off in the distance, we were hitting some not great performance. So we just took a step back, took a look at it, worked out what we could and couldn't do. And just through a better understanding of the way our engine works, we made significant improvements on the Carrack. The Carrack is not by any means our worst performing ship, but it was middle of the road. And we've got a lot of ships that, off the back of that, we've looked into and gone, oh, actually, do you know what? They're working pretty good, they're set up well, and we're quite happy with this. But a lot of it as well is, I could probably talk about it for an hour, so I won't. A lot of our initial budgets for our team, we have the rendering cost budgets that we set out really early on in the project. And then over the years, more features and more complexities have come into it. We have to go back and revisit those and go, actually, is it achievable to deliver the ships to the visual standard that we're aiming for, that support all the functionality that we require, and still be within those original budgets? The short answer is no. Even just things like the dashboard interaction system, separating off all those individual elements into their own interactive buttons and things like that adds cost. If you look at what we've done with the Gladius recently, adding in all the ship component panels and the access panels, that's all work that we've got marked on to do for our other ships, but that all impacts cost. So what we need to do is, we don't want to just be piling in, piling in feature work, and then suddenly be at a point where we've completely tanked the performance. So what we're trying to do is, every time we're adding something in, we're revisiting the way we create the assets and seeing where we can make savings. And with the Carrack stuff, like I say, a lot of it was just really digging in. We know where we can save performance, but it's really spending the time and getting into the details. And a lot of it's to do with our lighting setup, our VisArea setup, the way we do our LODs when you pull really far away from our ships, and a lot of the details. When you're working up close on a ship and you're manually doing these LODs, you can get a little bit tunnel vision on what you're working on. So it's actually looking at things and how they're going to be used in the game. So I'm rambling. We're making some great performance wins on the Carrack. That was our first one. And we'll be rolling on to more as we chip through the backlog.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Hopefully players don't even notice a visible difference on it either.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

If anything, we've been improving the visual pop and the LODs by just spending a bit more time thinking about exactly what the player sees.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

And to give a rough ballpark number, you can now have two Carracks on screen for the cost of one of them previously. And most of that's gone into 3.13.1. I think there might be a little bit more coming in 3.14.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

There are one or two things you might notice that we didn't quite get time to close out in time for 3.13.1, but it was better that we put it in with the performance gains that we did achieve. And there might be one or two things that we just have to go back and tweak. There's a little window that doesn't quite look right. Just minor details. But mostly it went in.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

So I guess most people have probably seen that when we originally released one of them into the PU, people were stealing it and glitching inside it. And you can probably tell that the interiors aren't done. If you look at the Javelin, there was a bunch of work to get it to where it was for the tour. But beyond that, there are some areas of the ship that are complete, and some that just have a little diagram on our internal Confluence page to tell us what's going to be in that area. So we wanted to get these in and get that player experience with the exteriors, but there's a little bit of work left to be done.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There's a lot of interior there. Like Ben said, there are bits that aren't done because these ships are primarily Squadron. So the thing we've said a lot is we want people's first experiences of them to be in Squadron, where it's this living, breathing environment. And there is a marked difference between what is needed for Squadron inside those ships and what is needed for a full-fat release in the PU, where you have to get to all these components and do things to these components and have interactions with all the seats and the setup for doing all of that. If we were to release them as they are now to players, they would probably be very disappointed with them, because you couldn't use them as a capital ship. They would just be an over-scaled single-seater fighter.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

A lot of corridor space.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So there is a lot of difference between the needs for Squadron and the needs for the full release in the PU.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

It's really cool seeing it. I love it. There's an awful lot of work to go into finishing the capital ships to a point where you get the gameplay you deserve out of it, rather than just getting, like you say, a shell with some corridors.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I know people want to do that [fly it around like an enormous Hornet], but that's not what we want.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes. The new radar and scanning system is quite a large change that... I don't know how to phrase it. It doesn't reset everything, but it makes the whole system nothing like the current system. And as a result, all the ships are going to behave differently within it to how they do now. And we do want the Prowler to be stealthier. But obviously, with such a huge change like that, it's probably going to take a few patches to get everything where we want it to sit. There are a lot of big changes coming to vehicle systems in the next few patches, and they are all requiring across-the-board balance changes. So whilst on the initial release you'll notice a big change, there are probably going to be a few outliers that we will need to hit in subsequent patches.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Maybe. We could start the eternal debate of: does a spaceship work underwater? I don't know. Let's start there. I always see the argument everywhere. Is a spaceship underwater a submarine, or is a submarine in space a spaceship?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The original concept layout for the ship certainly never had the full kitchen that the C2 now has in there, because when we came to build these ships, we almost entirely changed the interior design and layout. And having the full kitchenette for the C2 was something that we built in, and then we take it away for the other variants to make it fit in the space. And we probably went a bit too far in taking things away. So we'll be looking at, in future patches, a way of getting food-making facilities back. It won't be the full kitchenette like the C2 has, I can guarantee that. But there will be something on there. There have been some wild suggestions.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

Barbecue. It's a little bit odd as well, because I was actually supposed to be doing it today, but I haven't quite got to it yet. Looking at the different modules we have for all three variants and what we share between all three variants, you're like, oh yeah, okay, this feels quite natural. And then you're like, oh no, but in the next variant that puts it right next to the armory. Why would you want to be making your coffee while getting armored up? Maybe that works. But trying to find a natural place for it to fit is... we'll work something out.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The M2 and A2, again, is another problem where there is very limited commonality between the two of them internally.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

At least we've got a toilet next to the seats.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

That's a few questions in one there. Yes, there will be different materials for military and civilian ships. And we can even go down to the granularity of: this variant of the ship has a slightly hardened material that gives it some improved properties. In the first version of the physical damage rollout, we would not be letting you swap these things out. Whether we change that in the future, that's up for debate internally. But it's going to be such an apocalyptic change to how the game plays when that comes in. As people have predicted, and as we've talked about, all the existing meta for combat and damage and gameplay will be null and void with it, because you'll be moving away from this DPS race of just decreasing a thousand hit points to zero and winning, to targeting specific areas and disabling ships and doing something with those disabled ships.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

If you think about the sports car analogy, you can get a Porsche that is all aluminium or all metal, and then you get the top version, the GT3 or whatever, that is completely stripped back and it's got carbon fibre body panels and a carbon roof or whatever it might be. And I guess that's a similar approach we may or may not take to some of our ships.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes, and this is another thing that we could probably spend an hour alone talking about. I briefly mentioned it earlier with the radar and scanning stuff, so there are other features coming. It's what's referred to as capacitors, but we're probably going to rebrand it slightly to something more player-facing, because capacitors can give a slightly different impression of what they actually do. But as a result of that, we are literally changing the stats on every single spaceship. So they are all having changes done to not only handling, but health. All the weapons are having some changes done to them in terms of lethality. Ballistic weapons are having changes done to their ammo counts. So again, it's going to be a huge change, and all the ships are going to have a big shuffle around in terms of their combat prowess. And hopefully, as a result of that, and certainly from our internal testing it seems to be the case, those medium fighters are in a better place, because they seem to get overshadowed by the light and the heavy fighters. Everyone just goes, if I want agility, light fighter. If I want tankiness, heavy fighter. And the Hornets in the middle are like, what about me?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

They might change in name, but the roles won't really change. They might just get lumped together in more clear-cut categories.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes. So we did some very last-minute changes before 3.13.1 went live to fix some issues. And it fixed those issues, but didn't hit all the goals we wanted. And the lack of range was an unfortunate casualty of that. So we'll be looking at that again.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's a very hard question to answer because there are so many systems at play there, even with those two examples of an Idris and a Constellation. If the Idris hits you with that railgun fully charged out of the gate, it's going to be seconds. If they miss, then it's going to be much longer. But as a general, broad, extremely broad... don't hold me to this in many patches' time. It is not going to be the short 10 to 15 seconds that we can experience now in those scenarios where it's over before you know it. And if you get two good players together, they might stretch to a minute or two dogfighting. It is going to be longer than that. But whilst it might take a greater time, the actual combat within that time will be a much more intense and exciting thing.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I think, obviously this is really one for John to answer, but from my point of view, player skill is going to play a massive part in it. Like you just said. I'm an old World of Warcraft player, and some of the boss fights there can take a decent amount of time, but by the time you get it down, you know exactly what you're doing. You can speed run most things. It's going to be really exciting when we get all these systems on and you can actually have a group conflict with your mates. I always like playing a bit of the underdog, trying to take out some of these big mean capital ships. It's going to be awesome.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The combat now is definitely not how it's going to be, not even in the next few patches, let alone with physical damage, because the combat till then is very much time to kill. The outcome of combat is somebody explodes every single time, and that's the only outcome there is at the moment. And the chance of that happening with physical damage is radically reduced, because that's only going to happen if you do a critical hit to their power plant and it explodes. You're much more likely to then have a disabled ship that either needs boarding or salvaging or tractor beaming away. And then on the flip side of that, it's you in your disabled ship figuring out what you are now going to do as a result of your ship's damage, because previously you'd just be dead and there's no choice there. But do you stay with your wreck? Do you fight off the attackers? Do you hide on board your ship and hope they don't come and find you? Do you call for backup? It's just going to change everything.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I think physical damage for me is really exciting but also really scary, because from an art point of view, the way we make our ships has a real impact on their performance. And yes, we will be balancing things with the materials used, and that will be how we balance the ships out. But we always get a little bit of stick for, oh, there's a big empty bit of space behind this wall, and that sort of stuff. And it's like, well, that might not necessarily be such a bad thing when you get to proper hull thicknesses and physical damage. Having all your main systems just exposed across the main core of the ship and being there ripe for the picking, versus having them nicely tucked away in the belly of the ship, can make a big difference to the way the ships are going to behave and how combat is going to feel. It's super exciting but a little bit scary.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There are a lot of content changes that will be done to support it. And even if it was just a behind-the-scenes data change, it's a big change. But the content side just makes it this huge, huge thing.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We're aware of where it sits. It's not ideal. A few patches back, it wasn't particularly publicized, but it did have some behind-the-scenes tuning done on it to try and boost its ranking up the analytics. And it did actually have a good impact on that, especially with XenoThreat, where torpedoes became a menace. It had some very big flaws in the setup that had gone untouched for a while. The bomb bay doors only had like 50 health, which is a stiff breeze. And so when you shot them, you lost half your torpedoes, because they were attached to the doors. So we buffed them up. We buffed some of the wing mounts, not the gun mounts on the wings, but where the wings actually attach to the body, because again, they had far too low hit points. And with just a strafing shot across the ship, if you did it from underneath, you'd hit the bomb bay and it would lose all of its torpedoes. You'd hit a wing, blow that off, and you've lost half your guns, half your missiles. So we did do that pass. From an art side, I think the turret probably is the biggest offender. It's very much our old methodology of doing turrets, where you're sat in a turret and the pitch is your neck, which isn't a great experience for keeping everything in view, compared to our more modern ships where you sit in almost a ball turret and it moves. And for me personally, that's where I want to go with all our turrets, because it provides a consistent experience across the board. You don't have these weird turrets where I'm in this turret and I look up and down and my neck moves that way because it's fixed. You're keeping it one-to-one with your inputs.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's a racer slash interceptor. It gets half a question by being half a military ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Is there any new plan for it? I know it was going to get different engines at one point.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We still have those second engines to make, but it's just gone down the priority list of things. The art is done, but it requires some work from the tech team, because we have two ways to set it up: one is a bad way of setting it up that would get it sooner, and one is the correct way of doing it. The problem being it has two thrusters on the back, and swapping it out changes it to one thruster, so we need to make sure IFCS handles that scenario, which is not a common scenario, where we tune a ship and then by attaching an item, you lose half your main thrust. So it needs to work with that, and we want to do it the proper way, because then that will allow us to do it to other ships in the future.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The classic clown car question. The big thing that will stop this, or maybe not stop, because I know how tenacious people are at doing things, but that will disincentivize it, will be the life support system. So the ships are all going to have a life support item on there, and that life support item is going to be tuned for that ship and that ship's crew. So life support generates the oxygen and scrubs all the carbon dioxide out. So it will be filling it at a rate that the designated crew can consume. So if you've suddenly got five people in the back of your 100i that's only designed to take one person, you're going to be using the air five times quicker than the system can produce it, at a very basic, simplistic level. I guess the air is going to run out and you're going to be stuck in your spacesuits, and then you're going to use your spacesuit air, and then bad things are going to happen.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

It looks a lot cooler as well, doesn't it, to actually be a proper dropship, rather than trying to just farm a bunch of people out the back of a 100.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Force reactions are the other thing, and we've seen more iterations of that come in, where if you crash into things, your person gets thrown across the floor. Or when the ship's banking, you're staggering and you can't move. So if you're not actually strapped into a seat and a bad player hits the ground a bit too hard in their drop, you're not getting checked. Myself, personally, I've been thrown out of ships in a design playtest where someone's been doing low flying and we've clipped the ground. And I've been stood on the back ramp, foolishly, and it's just thrown me out of the ship. And I've died when I probably should have been sat in the seat.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Not for me. That's not to say there isn't a line of lore somewhere that says it is a military vehicle, but for me it's not to the same military standard as the base Sabre... brain completely gone there.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

If you can load it in from the top somehow, I guess.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

I was going to say yes, but John sounded a little bit more hesitant, so maybe not.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes, but it's a low priority. We got rid of them in the original Vanguard, and then we brought them back when we redid it. And it's the same with any ships that have wheeled gear. We want to have them actually function like they look, so you could do rolling taxiways. But in the grand scheme of things, it is very low down the list to spend programmer time on.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Because it's a one-person ship. You're not expected to fly and scan with that big radar at the same time.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There are quite a few ships that we've promised with it. They're all still going to have it. In the near future, we are putting the vehicle tech team on actually doing the tech to allow this. And we're going to start with the Retaliator. They are simply working on the tech first, and we want to get that functional, and then we will work out when we release the actual modules. They may not be the same time frame. You may get the tech in first and then we spend a quarter or two working on those modules, because they were done quite a long time ago and the seats are not quite to the current standards. So we will do that. The technical issue with it at the moment is we need to have object containers for these rooms that swap out. They need to be items that swap in and out. But we need to have that link between the contents of that room and the parent ship. So on the Retaliator, you have those torpedoes. They need to be self-contained within this room, so you detach it and you can put another room in there. Because if you did that at the moment, you'd just have these two torpedo arms dangling through your recreation room. It is planned. We're still working on it. It's not a cut feature. I see plenty of people saying that we're never doing it. And we'll just do it in select circumstances. Not every ship is going to have a modular feature.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director and Weapons Art Director

So that touches on how the feature team may have time in their schedule to be tackling some of this stuff, but that might not necessarily align fully. Where possible, we're always trying to line this stuff up, but the company's pretty big and everyone's working on a lot of things at once. So it's not always a case that we can go, OK, cool, the feature team is finished in week X, and then in week Y we just start on the art, because sometimes in week Y we might be two months away from closing out a capital ship or a single-seater or whatever it might be, that we need to focus on, and we can't afford to just up and leave to finish other priorities.