Star Citizen Live | DefenseCon Showcase

To be blunt, it's for someone who wants to do a lot of cargo. They want a ship that's relatively durable, and they like Drakes that have lots of guns. Because Drake ostensibly market this as a cargo manufacturer, but we all know what Drake tends to get up to, so sometimes the cargo's not as legit as it should be, or maybe the cargo is cargo you've got to deliver pain to other people. But yeah, it sort of caters to that. And externally, at least, I think it's pretty true to the concept. We did make some changes to it. Dan begged for an extra entrance into the top of it.

Yeah, traversal was such a massive thing for this ship versus the concept, I remember. And with the signage as well, I remember when we worked on the Polaris, one of the key pieces of feedback was that the signage wasn't as good as it could be. And obviously we went back and edited that a bit, but with this ship...

We had the stairs around the other way as well, didn't we?

Yeah, the stairs have flipped. I believe the elevator was added as well. When we actually got it in and started running around it, once we actually started putting the blockout together, we made a few changes just so it felt a bit more natural, because there was a lot of back and forth and hard 90 and hard 180 degrees that people were having to do as they were walking around. So we softened a lot of the corners, put 45s in. Like here, the wall got knocked in so this became an open area, which I think really helped differentiate the different decks, which is obviously something that we tried really hard to do. You should always know roughly where you are, and when you're in a modular kit, because this is one of the most modular ships we've ever made...

That's developer modularity. You always have to specify: there's player-facing modularity, and then there's the method in which we make our ships.

Yeah, so when we talk about developer modularity, what we mean is the asset pack that you use to author the vehicles. So let's say you have a wall that's two meters long. It doesn't make sense to model every single wall two times, in the same way that if you were to make a car, you wouldn't 3D model every single wheel again. You'd want to duplicate it. So we have this base layer of modularity of our assets underneath, and then we sit on top of that these extra assets that make each of the spaces feel different. And it was really important for us to make it so no matter where you were stood in the ship, you didn't feel lost and you were able to quickly orient yourself. I get the first time you're in it, it's a big ship, you're not going to know exactly where you're going, but it shouldn't take long to establish that.

A sense of exploration though, isn't it? The first time you enter a ship, you want to explore it. You don't necessarily just want to be like, I go in it and I know exactly what's going on. So I think that's part of the charm of these bigger ships, that you do need to explore them a little bit. Obviously, like you say, having navigation is an important user experience thing that we need to try and improve. Obviously, we've got the minimap as well, which helps a lot with that sort of stuff.

You shouldn't have to rely on that.

You shouldn't have to rely on that. As you're heading towards engineering, even though you're in a corridor, you want to start seeing those engineering-y elements bleeding out into the room, so it doesn't feel too stale. And then when you get up to habitation and stuff, you want things to be a little bit more clad, a little bit more refined.

I've seen a lot of discourse about it being artificially weak, which I think is not intended. It should be passing damage through to the main ship rather than killing everything. But there is some intent design-wise. The number one question everyone always has about the Ironclad is, why can't I fly it from the main bit? And that's never been the idea with this ship. You have this main block of a ship, same with the Caterpillar, and the command module gives you that functionality to fly around. That's the sort of USP of these sort of ships.

It's not the same as every other ship. There's always this assumption that you're trying to make every single ship be the ultimate ship, and it's not. The ships are supposed to have certain trade-offs. You get this, but you lose this. If you don't like it, that's fine. There are 200-some-odd other ships out there. The command module is interesting because it is, for all intents and purposes, a standalone craft. It can do everything a standalone ship can do. It can go to quantum. There was some confusion internally earlier, people kept referring to it as a parasite ship, and I'm like, no, if anything, the main hull is the parasite, because it needs the command module to survive, not the other way around. So as far as it being a critical weak point, that's something with the damage not being passed in?

Yeah, simply, it's a bug. The intention with the feature itself is for the command module to not be a critical part, clearly for gameplay purposes, because you don't want a very big, durable ship like the Ironclad should be to get shot down by whoever with the command module being destroyed in very, very few shots, because clearly the size difference is enormous. So the damage is going to be passed onto the Ironclad specifically, or the Caterpillar, depending on which one you are attached to. And all the damage to the components themselves would be passed to the Ironclad as well. So everything inside the command module would be in a dormant state, so to say. So basically the damage is going to be passed onto the main body.

Does that allow you to, when it does detach, have a suitable...

Yeah, exactly, a suitable raft that you can immediately go away and flee from it. The cool stuff is that you can also trigger the self-destruct and then leave the ship and fly out with the command module. So have fun with that.

So the short answer is that damage is supposed to be passed on to the main hull and it's just not at the moment. So it'll be addressed.

Yeah, as soon as possible. I think we already have a fix in for the hotfix, but as always, tentative fixes.

There should be a new series of fixes going out on Tuesday of next week that address a couple other things with the item recovery stuff. So if we can, we'll loop that in there. So that should be better for people before DefenseCon [ends].

It is clearly the intended gameplay dynamic that we want to reach, because clearly we don't want you to lose the ship, especially with the item recovery patch as well.

So we have a couple of things that are interesting, I would say, specifically. One of them being clearly the durability. It's meant to be a very durable cargo ship with very capable SCU cargo capacity. And for that reason, since at some point we're going to have, for all the ships in our roster, the cargo mass affecting the ship, we also need to make sure that the flight profile handles it fine, that you can carry the cargo inside the planets or outside to the moons and so on and so forth. And one of the trickiest things for us on the balance side for the Ironclad has been trying to find a sweet spot without compromising the overall balance performance, in order to still let you lift off with the full cargo hold, because on the Ironclad specifically, if you have cargo on your cargo grid, the mass of the ship will change and the flight maneuverability will change as well. So one of them was basically tuning the VTOL thrusters and activating them in a way that you can still lift off with a full cargo bay loaded with all the goods that you can have, but only in VTOL mode. So when you're fully loaded, you have to use VTOLs, take off, go outside of the hangar, go outside of the planet, and then you can switch them off.

There are some issues with them. Drives me crazy. I love it when the first time people see ships, all the lighting's broken. It's brilliant. It's broken. It should be being fixed. It infuriates me as much, if not more, than everyone else.

So you're saying it's not a design intent?

There is design intent in there. We lit the Ironclad to be quite moody. I think one of the issues is it's starting in emergency mode, so it's lots of flashing red, which is absolutely not the intent, not what we planned for, unless your ship is in an emergency state. There's lots of light panels around the ship to be able to put it back to how it should be. Unfortunately, that isn't a particularly user-friendly way of getting your ship to look how it was intended to. But yeah, there's a bug. Unfortunately, it didn't make the cut for 4.8, but it should be getting fixed. It's not unique to the Ironclad, though. It's something we're fighting with.

Yeah, it's every ship.

That question comes up quite often, and I always go back to 2017 and the wait for 3.0, when we didn't have any new content for like nine months because we waited and waited and waited and tried to get everything done, tried to get everything perfect, tried to get everything dialed in, and there was no new content for nine months. I had that stupid beard because I said I wasn't going to shave until the patch came out. And even with all that work and even with all that waiting, it still had its issues. The answer is there's no such thing as waiting until something's perfect. There's just not. So we put things out in the best condition that we can, and we continue to fix, and we continue to push, and we continue to develop afterwards, which is what the folks working on the hotfix for the mission system are doing right now, which is what you're doing with fixing the damage pass-through for the Ironclad. And our friends from CGP4 as well. Shout out to them.

It's got more guns. That's one of the big ones. It has a larger front door. Again, something from the concept time, there was an intentional difference that the Ironclad Assault is designed for assault. So it's got a big enough front door on it that can fit tanks and Ballistas, which the base Ironclad can't. That can only really fit rover-sized vehicles. It trades off some cargo capacity, so it's 1,500-odd, which is actually, I think, pretty much what the original Ironclad concept had. So they both had a glow-up.

I think it's technically 14-something. But its big thing is it's now got the service bay.

Yes, the services bay, which is located in the rear third, which Will is handily looking at here, denoted by the floor texture difference and the half gantries above.

And in an upgrade from the original concept, the concept was only supposed to be able to service ground vehicles.

It's just anything that can fit in the zone. If you can fit it in the volume, then it will allow you to do it. And if you obviously have the supplies on board.

Ship hangar service is probably one of my favorite features that have come online with 4.8. Because now you see all the people that do the crazy fleet operations, and now being able to actually repair, refuel and rearm on the go gives tremendous utility to things like the Idris, beyond just, hey, I'm a railgunner. And even things like the 890 Jump, the 600i stuff, and as those continue to progress, they'll get more utility. The vehicle services thing, it's repair, refuel and rearm. You need RMC to do the repairs. You need fuel and commodities and ammo and countermeasures. And the ammo stuff is new for 4.8, actually having commodities. And then it's got the additional remote turrets.

Yeah, and some of them are upgunned to quad mounts instead of dual mounts as well. It's got the jump seats at the front as well.

Pretty much, yeah. One of the very common questions I get at Bar Citizens a lot is, I love ship X, but I hate manufacturer X. And as we've talked about many times, we have our big ship matrix of sizes and roles, and we always want to fill everything, and then within that have options. And the Pitbull is just a great Fury alternative. One of the hard design requirements I set from the start for it was it must not exceed the bounds of the Fury. So that presented some challenges, because the Fury, which Dan worked on, was a challenge for fitting stuff in. Wanting more guns on it didn't make it easier.

It's got six guns. What is it, four size ones, two size twos? That's nuts. And it's got missiles. So talk to me about this decision. You're going to add six guns and missiles to this. Do any of you have any conscience whatsoever?

The only problem is we couldn't fit more. Physically, there isn't space to fit more and make it still fit inside the Fury's bounding boxes.

We've been told a couple of times, more than a couple of times, I'm afraid, to make it less cute, because it was really, really cute. We tried to make it as small as possible, like Sam did, obviously. And we had to make a proper effort to change the aesthetic in order to be less cutesy and more pitbull, and less pug, I guess. His concepts were really cute.

The other one had really big eyes. One had floppy ears and stuff. Not even exaggerating, there were parts of it that looked like there were floppy ears. When Chris first saw it, he just sent me a Minions gif, and I'm like, I don't know how to take this. Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? And then we got to the bottom of what he was after and adapted it. And I think it turned out great. I think it's amazing. I think it's super Drake. I think one of my favorite bits is just the size of the engine. Engine versus overall dimensions is perfect for it.

One of the keys of the aesthetic that we wanted for the ship was that you're not riding a ship, you're riding an engine.

Well, our balance tuning will be revisited in the future, but in general, this is the deal. We want those little snub ships to be a threat to smaller craft like the Gladius, for example, and not a threat to something bigger, like mostly everything else on this table. So the question is more where you should try to employ those ships and what you should use them for, because clearly, on the other side, yes, you might say the gun size is a bit low, but the performance instead is outstanding, because the overall forward thrust ratio is very good. Maneuverability, the rates of rotation are amazing. The handling as well. It's very reactive. So you might have less powerful guns, but if you want to, for example, storm a couple of fighters and fight them, then probably it's a good tool to do that. Clearly there are downsides on the durability, it's Drake and everything else.

But also the guns are swappable. You can change the guns out.

Yeah, you can use ballistics as well. But we now have, with the armor system, some damage threshold that you need to meet in order to apply any damage.

Sure, but that's still subject to change, being worked on. We do have future plans for it.

And also, nothing prevents you from going out in a group and using other types of ships to bring down the armor and then using other ships that have less powerful guns to then apply damage as well.

Plus, it's bringing the right tool for the job. The ship isn't designed to take on Polarises.

It's no different. I've been at this for a long time now. And the short answer is you just can't. These aren't the guys that work on performance and stuff, and their work doesn't get held up by somebody else's work. Not if you can help it, anyway. Sometimes it does. But sometimes it is so ridiculous where these bugs come from and how to fix them. This isn't a terrible bug, but for the two days before release, we couldn't update the TIFF files. We'd submit a new TIFF and it just wouldn't update. That's why there's a map in the show hall that says the Drake Peeble right now. And we're all just looking at it going, we seriously can't fix the Drake Peeble on a map? We know it's there. We can't fix that. There's just other more important things to deal with right now.

It's like Groundhog Day as well, because we had the same one. There's a paint that's gone out. The thumbnail's slightly wrong on it. And we update it, submit it, come the next day, it's still broken, and you check, and all the work's been done. It's just that Groundhog Day moment, and then you realize that it's not actually our fault.

It's all triage. You do the best you can, you try to get as much as you can, but at the end of the day, the only alternative is 2017 and 3.0, and you end up with nothing out for nine months, and we swore after that that we would never do that again.

I think it was kind of double-sided, really, because not only was it an Origin ship that we haven't done in ages, I've not been involved in an Origin start-to-finish new concept at all since looking after the ship team. I was on the 400i in production, but not in terms of the concept side. So we had a manufacturer new to us to play with, but also it's their debut into pure combat. So that was also something else we could do. I've obviously been paying attention to what people's reaction has been. And some people have called out, oh, this doesn't feel quite that Origin, this bit doesn't feel quite that Origin. But it was a chance to look at the manufacturer with fresh eyes. It's a new role. It's where we want to take it. Do we want to stick to the same old that we've done for all the more commercial stuff? Or do we actually want to push the limits a little bit? You look at a lot of real-world manufacturers of cars and, don't get me wrong, some do the really cool things and then others do interesting things. And I think it's our chance to just inject a little bit of new life into the manufacturer.

Heavy fighter, but not like all heavy fighters. It's very sleek, looks very, very fast. So we thought from the get-go, to be fair, with Giorgi, our other designer on the team, that the interceptor [tuning] would have been perfect for this type of ship. So basically you could expect this M80 to go up against the Scorpius in terms of performance. They're quite similar in role and with similar capabilities, with differences between the two, of course. But yeah, this is pretty much what you can expect. So very, very fast straight-line speeds. It's not the best in terms of rates of rotation and handling, but it's very fast, and especially with the speed that you can reach under boost, that is going to help you a lot, especially in group fights. It's going to be very, very interesting. So far, the Scorpius is, we know nowadays, one of the best heavy fighters that we have in the lineup in terms of balancing and tuning and feel. And we think with the M80, it was a good opportunity to try to dive more into this type of tuning and this type of experience specifically, to make it shine as well.

We've got a bed, it's got weapon racks, got access to all your components. We wanted it to keep its Origin DNA, but be a heavy fighter. And so one of the things that is helpful is having easy access to all your components. So we prioritised that functionality as the main thing that we really wanted on the interior of the ship. And then obviously being able to stow your weapons and personal storage and that sort of stuff.

It wasn't meant to be like an explorer or anything like that. It was supposed to be combat focused. It's got a little bit of space so you can keep general boxes from utility missions, like the small ones that you gather, and obviously for loadouts, standard weapon racks, a little bit of personal storage. The core components to keep the ship actually running are all inside, so you don't have to go outside if they get damaged; you can repair them from the inside. But obviously there's not enough space for all the components on the inside, so the less critical ones for being able to actually operate the ship are outside the ship.

I think it really depends on the role and depends on what we want to do with it. Obviously we want an Origin ship to feel like an Origin ship, and I think that's key to it. You see this vehicle lined up against the others, you can see the DNA from it, and that's what we want to keep. It really depends on the role of the ship. If we do more fighters, we might take similar inspirations. If we do more commercial ships, we might not. In the more commercial stuff, we've looked at a lot of yachts, that side of things, whereas, personally, a yacht doesn't feel very combat. So I think there's a lot of range within our manufacturers to experiment with visuals, and I think that's one of the nice things of the game that we work on, that we are able to try new ideas and experiment with new visual ideas.

It's combined two different DNAs. You've got the Origin DNA, and Origin has its own identity, but you wouldn't expect an industrial Origin ship or a combat Origin ship to look the same. You'd expect them to be completely different. This is one of our first times doing a very dedicated, completely only combat-focused Origin ship, and it has a little bit of difference, but it's the same way that a combat Drake ship is a bit different from a combat...

I mean, the 325 is a combat ship, but it's a variant of an existing line, so there's only so much you can do with a variant.

Exactly. The 125 and the M50 have that split of interceptor and racer. But this is a true, dedicated fighter as is.

You see it in real-life automotive manufacturing and aeronautic manufacturing as well, that even though Boeing makes planes, they also make helicopters, and Rolls-Royce makes engines, not just cars.

Mitsubishi makes everything. You're touching on one of my biggest pet peeves here. When people are like, that doesn't look like X manufacturer, or Y manufacturer wouldn't do that, I always go to Mitsubishi. This is the same company that makes tanks, refrigerators, elevators.

I do think it's important to keep some kind of core DNA. When there's a BMW right behind you, you know it's a BMW. There's always these core parts of the DNA of the manufacturer. I think Alberto touched on it perfectly when he was doing the first fly-around, about how Origin always reconnects the lines back around, and that core art direction can be applied to other contexts. There's core rules, and then there's areas to flex those rules.

But even brands evolve over time. In the fiction of our universe, some of these ships, like the Idris and the Javelin, are hundreds of years old. So why would an Aegis ship today look anything like an Idris that was designed 200 years ago? They've got new people. They come in with new ideas, new technologies.

The Zeus Mk I versus the Zeus Mk II is probably the most clear example.

Technically, the Connie folks are flying right now is the Mark IV. You saw that change from the Mark III back in the day. RSI is a great one. You look at the new Aurora. It's not that the old ones never happened. It's that these things evolve.

Within RSI as well, if you look at the Polaris, it's the more military-centered, whereas if you look at things like the Apollo, it's a little bit cleaner and not military. Look at the Connie as well, like the Phoenix. They're very different DNA, but at the same time, they're both very obviously RSI.

Because we need another one. The opening into refueling can't be the Starfarer. It's too big. It's too far on through the game progression. We needed something earlier, smaller, just for one person to get out there and start engaging with the gameplay. And one of the early design brief parts of this was to have interoperability with the Starfarer, so it reuses the Starfarer fuel pods, and they are quite large. And just having one didn't really give you that much fuel to do refueling with. Plus we needed the two types of fuel, one for quantum and hydrogen. So it becomes quite a large ship for what is essentially a starter in the refueling career, but it does everything the Starfarer does in about a quarter of the size. It does all of the refueling gameplay that the Starfarer does.

I remember when we first kicked off the concept and we were like, okay, let's get the fuel pods in. Where are we going to put the ship? Because they're so big.

Well, there is a reason it looks so cute and tubby, because there was no space left. This is from Laith, and he had to squash a lot of components, an entire dashboard, interiors, in a very limited amount of space with these massive refueling pods.

And it needed the refueling arm. And they needed to be accessible so they could be tractor-beamed out. And they wanted a lift. It was one of those things where there was a long list of things that we needed to tick off as we were concepting this. And I think they smashed it.

No, because it's got an interior walking space. But the canopy ejects. I'm pretty sure it works. It works on my machine.

So does that mean it's John's fault if it doesn't work in release?

No, it would be mine, because I would have got to change it to the correct setup. The answer is: find out tomorrow.

It is just the case that we're not actively choosing not to put LAMP on the new ships. I did a post on Spectrum about it a few weeks back that explains it's not a 'we're choosing to ignore LAMP', it's a 'this is how ships are built'. They're built one of two ways, and one way supports it out of the box. And the feature of LAMP needs to evolve to the next stage, and then it will apply to everything. When the code side of it works, they're already set up for LAMP. All the setups are there; they just don't work.

No fuel harvesting gameplay. Like I said, this is a starter, this is an introduction to refueling. It has all of the refueling features that the Starfarer has. It doesn't have the other stuff, it's just the refueling side of it. And a number of new improvements are coming to that gameplay. The process of refueling has gotten easier. You no longer have to open your nozzle and stuff like that. And they've added refueling beacons. At the moment, only NPCs come to respond to the beacons, but that'll continue to evolve like any other feature and push to more and more players. But refueling and medical gameplay are two of the loops that separate Star Citizen from a lot of stuff. I'm going to be real frank. They both need a lot of work. They both need some more development. Let's just get that out of the way. They're loops that aren't for you. It's like everything else. You understand bounty hunting is for you. You get the thrill of the hunt and the kill. Cargo and mining and salvage is for you. You're building your empire and amassing your fortunes. All the fighting, all the adventuring, all the industrial, it's all for you. But then there's medical, and there's refueling, which is just about helping your fellow citizen. That's really all it is. Nobody's going to get rich making refueling ships. It's just not going to happen. And nobody's going to get rich going out and patching people up. But it's such an amazing opportunity for Star Citizen gameplay to push beyond the more obvious things into this kind of altruistic thing. We need to be better at supporting it and to continue developing it, because there's something really special in both of these. And yes, this is the first step in refueling gameplay. Almost a decade at this point. So hopefully we continue to push this, because things like refueling and medical are really exciting to me, because it's nice to see somebody, you go to a Bar Citizen, like, oh, I'm a medic, I just play the game to help other people. And I love that. So I'm hoping if we keep pushing refueling gameplay, I'll start to hear, oh, I'm just a refueler. I just go and I just help people.

We got a few nice things changed when we looked at refueling again a little bit for the Starlight coming out, and it's resulted in a few benefits for the Starfarer: the pods got some more attention, some art cleanup, making them easier to get on and off both the Starfarer and the Starlight. We ended up changing how the nozzle worked. At the moment, you could change the nozzle on the Starfarer, but you could only do it through the VMA. But because we want the nozzles to be shared between them, we changed how the items were attaching, so you'll be able to change the nozzles between the Starfarer and the Starlight, and it just gave it a bit more time. But you're right, it does need more time, more development on it, because it's a really cool gameplay loop for someone that wants to do that.

No. Not every game loop is supposed to be a path to riches. That's basically what I just got done saying. It's like not all ships are supposed to be able to do all missions. Not all ships are supposed to be able to kill all other ships. There are choices to be made. And in Star Citizen, you're not meant to be one thing. You're not meant to be only this. You know, I'm only a miner and that's the only loop I do. If that's what you choose, so be it. But we are attempting to build a universe here where you're a miner on Monday and you're a hauler on Tuesday and you're a salvager on Wednesday and maybe you're a medic on Thursday. And they all provide unique and interesting experiences with all their own unique and interesting rewards, should we do this right. And no, not every profession needs to be a path to insane riches. It's not always about the destination to wealth in that case.

I think one thing that excited me about the Starlight was, because we obviously heard about it being in development while we were doing the Ironclad, and we can rearm and refuel inside of the Ironclad Assault, someone made a good point like, oh, you can just stay out in space in the Ironclad and just come and refuel it and then have all your smaller Pitbulls come out of that, and you can stay out in space. And that was when it first started to click for me. When you talk about how it's not necessarily about being this path to riches, but if you're the refueling guy for a bigger org, and that bigger org has got these bigger initiatives and they're making money doing these other things, you might not get rich doing it, but you might get paid really well if you're really good at it. I'm sure there's orgs out there that heard what we were talking about, and it's like, well, we could have a fleet of refueling ships, and their only job is to just make sure that all of our fighters and all of our big ships have got fuel. And at that point, maybe you could get rich, because you're part of that bigger ecosystem and that bigger progression.

And as you know, Tactical Strike Groups, which just came out in 4.8 here, is this next big step towards more coordinated ship-based gameplay. There are, of course, players and organizations out there that have been doing fleet ops for years. Those technologies continue to develop as armor continues to come on, as Maelstrom comes online, as time-to-kill starts to expand, and there's more time out in the fight. There's more capital ships coming online: the Javelin after the Idris, the Odin, and stuff like this. There will be more opportunities to, oh, this fight isn't done. And these larger ships can't fit in the bay of an Idris and can't fit in the bay of an 890 Jump. They're going to need refueling ships in order to stay in the fight. So there's even a role within fleet ops for refueling ships, which is why, to answer the question that we started at the beginning of this, a refueling ship is at DefenseCon.

Well, the original brief was, let's add a beam weapon to the Hammerhead. And like you say, every time we showed this in concept, it was, it needs to be more shark. And I hope that we nailed it in the end.

So I'll be honest, I was a little bit skeptical about how far to push it.

And I think that's fair. And then I got an image of Bruce from Finding Nemo. And it was like, this.

I remember going to Alberto and being like... how? Okay. But I think this was Sam as well, wasn't it? I think it was one of those where we pushed and pushed and pushed it, and then we all sort of went, yeah, he nailed it. He's got it. It definitely has that shark DNA. There's no hiding from that. But it feels like a ship that could exist. It feels very brutal. It feels very aggressive. And it's got that absolutely exquisite line that just runs all the way down from the side to the very, very tip. And it still sits in that sort of age of Aegis next to the Hammerhead, and that's something we were really, really conscious of. Because it was being built around the Hammerhead as its core, it would have been so easy to push its, let's call it its manufacturing date, far into the future, and we didn't want that. We wanted it to feel like it still sat alongside the Hammerhead nicely. And then the other, I guess not happy accident, but the result of us having to put more time into it than we were expecting, was we took a look at the turrets, and one of the things we looked at was, actually, this would be a really good opportunity to put remote turrets onto it. And I think that was absolutely the right decision. Functionality-wise, that's super good.

And don't bury the lede here. These are remote turrets. So your crew is not spread all...

Not to the extent, yeah. They are much better protected within their little cubbyholes. Gives them much better visibility as well. The visibility, the range, just how we can package it, I think is super cool. Every time we showed Mark the concept, we had the weapons on the outside and he's like, no, put them on the inside, and then we'd flip them. And I think little decisions like that that really improve the gameplay are super cool. And then, just visually, obviously the front looks like a shark. And then we tried to build on that with the little armor pockets on the side that feel like the gills, and the big fin in the middle, which is actually a big cooling mechanism for the main laser. We didn't want it to be just a fin down the middle. We wanted to give these things purpose. And obviously you've got a massive beam on the front of it, so we needed to build in those cooling elements. It was one of those things where the more time we spent with it, the more things fell into place.

I remember every time we were going through the concept meeting, every time Ben was coming back and being like, oh, well, it needs to be more shark. And I just kept thinking to myself, this still has the same delivery date. This is starting to look like a lot more modifications.

I can't remember if it was late in 4.7.2 or in 4.8 PTU, but there were some fixes done that improved the hit registration of it. And also there was a bug where if you hit an attached item, say a door, such as the front of the Idris, which is all doors, it was not correctly passing damage up the ship. That's now fixed in 4.8, but there are still some other quirks regarding it not correctly doing damage.

It's almost the inverse of the command module thing. The command module, we need it to pass damage, and this one it wasn't.

Both of them are sort of torturously related, in that it's failing to pass damage in the correct way up and down the hierarchy. But people are working on it. They know what is wrong with it. It's just trying to find an elegant solution. Like most game development, in any studio, you fix one thing, doesn't mean you don't make two other issues.

The only thing for me to talk about is this completes the trifecta of heavy gunships. So you have the Hammerhead, which is your anti-fighter. You have the Perseus, which is your anti-large ships. And then this is your anti-capital. Everything is designed to face forwards with this.

The gunship mentality has always been engaging multiple targets. The Hammerhead and the Perseus are all about attacking multiple targets simultaneously. And this is the first gunship that's like, no, focus fire to take down capital ships.

It still has those four remote turrets, so it can spread its fire, but really you want all that fire going in one direction. It still has its anti-fighter turret at the very rear, just for a little bit more coverage, but realistically, your four main turrets at the front are designed to hit something bigger. You might be able to hit a fighter with it if you have a very, very good shot and the pilot isn't trying to avoid you, but realistically you're aiming at something big because you want to hurt it.

Yeah, and the tuning reflects that as well in general. From the batch of ships that we have for 4.8, this has been probably the most difficult one to tackle for us, because it has a very specific purpose, and you want, as a designer, to let the ship fulfill that purpose, and only that one. And the risk with this powerful weapon was basically to let it be too effective against everything else that it was not supposed to be, for example against a Perseus or against a smaller ship like the Constellation. So our challenge here was to make the ship interesting in order to go up against capital ships. So it was having enough maneuverability and enough agility to cope with an Idris and be somewhat safe just by orbiting around, keeping the distance, but also to not be effective against something smaller than an Idris, like for example a Perseus. The way we did that was basically playing with the overall feeling of the ship. The ship is going to feel way heavier than a Hammerhead, for example, even though they are similar. Clearly, you have a giant laser beam on top of your head when you're piloting it, so you're going to feel it. You're going to struggle to stay on smaller targets, because once again, the ship is going to be not responsive at all. But clearly you don't need it against a very giant target like an Idris or even something bigger. So this is going to be interesting to see come into play, because also it's not going to be as armored as the Perseus. So it can be potentially threatened by those smaller ships. So maybe a Perseus showing up in the battlefield would pose a serious threat against a Tiburon and could maybe nail it quite quickly if their gunners are very strong.

That's really, as you said, sort of the rule. The Perseus is designed to take out other ships of its class.

It'll also be very susceptible to torpedoes because of the fact that it's lost all of its anti-fighter turrets, except for the one at the rear.

If there's a Polaris in the area, the big turrets aren't really going to be able to stop it.

I'm always curious about this question, because there have been some very clear rules about this since the beginning of the project. A variant shares the name of the base ship. It's an Avenger Warlock. It's a Constellation Phoenix. It's an Aurora LX. It's a Sabre Raven. When it shares the name of the base ship, that's a variant. When it doesn't share the name of the base ship, it's not a variant. That rule has been in place since the project began. But nevertheless, 13 years on, we still get a lot of questions. There's always a very clear naming attachment to the base ship. We're always very deliberate when we do that. And from the Mantis to the Meteor, one of the reasons we change the name is to make it, we thought, very clear that this is not a variant. This is a wholly new ship built on an existing chassis, the way that there are multiple ships built on the old Charger chassis for Dodge. So we can clear that up right now, and hopefully that can get picked up and people can shout it from the rooftops. When the name is different, not a variant. When it's the name plus a differentiator, or in the case of the Origin ships, if it's a number difference, it's the same.