The ship team covers the Redeemer's shift to a pure gunship, the Carrack's swappable pods and feedback, and the MOLE's mining. They also discuss physicalized components, ship sabotage, the Hull C's blockers, the Starlifter order, and physics-based damage.
TL;DRThe AI Blade and NPC crew are gameplay-designer systems, not the ship team's; the AI Blade will eventually be a vehicle item within the ship computer, but nobody is working on it currently.
Now, those seem to be very kind of separate questions and unfortunately the first two systems are for gameplay designers and not the ship team. But we wanted to mention it just because it was the top voted question and to inform the questions that come into live that we're trying to focus on more of the ship design and less on the gameplay function of this kind of stuff. Is the AI Blade as a ship component something that's in your wheelhouse, John?
It will be something that's in my wheelhouse eventually when we actively start working on it because it will be a vehicle item that's part of the computer item which goes in the ships. So yes, eventually it will be, but we're not currently as of this moment working on it.
Okay, so down the pipeline, all these computer components being able to swap in and out, including one of them being, hopefully, the AI Blade to slot in there.
TL;DRPhysicalized components are progressing slowly as ongoing core tech: placement is planned at concept, groundwork for placing items in object containers is done, hopefully more next quarter, and the code should finish before the art.
Well, so that's something that we can both talk about. Because for a lot of the ships, we deal with a concept point now: we have the metrics for all the components.
Yes, we do. So we have a new concept artist who started with us about five and a half months ago. So he started as a junior and so we've slowly been running him through the mill, as we say, and so we've been giving him components to look at. I mean, it's a lot better now that we've got actual metrics. Everything's better now that we've got metrics. And so it's really just sort of making our way through the massive list of manufacturers that you guys have made for us. Thank you, Will and Dave. And just figuring out what the style guide is, basically, from my side of things.
And then pretty much every ship in the last two, three years concept-wise has had the placement of them identified at concept. So when the production teams come to them, they're built. You would have seen it in sort of ships... The Terrapin was the first big one that really went to town with the component hatches, so you could see where they all go. And then everything since then has them and everything before then has a plan for where they're going to go in terms of actually putting the physical items in those places. So this quarter, one of the vehicle teams actually did the preliminary work to be able to place actual items inside the object containers, which can then connect to the vehicles, which gives us the ability to put them in place and then down the line gives us the ability to shoot them from the outside to do the physical damage to them. The stopping point has always been up until now, and still a little bit now, that everything inside an object container can't talk to the vehicle that it's within, which has stopped Retaliator modules from progressing because we needed to have the missile launchers inside the object container so it could all be swapped out with the entire bay. But we've got the groundwork for that now. Next quarter, we can hopefully do a little bit more. It's one of these long ongoing core tech tasks that you just chip away a bit every month and you slowly get close to the end. It's not a one line and bam, everything's done. You need to sort of re-archetype a few things. But it's still planned, still happening. We're slowly getting there. The biggest hurdle is really just the art debt from having to go back to these old ships and... The code will be done sooner than the art.
We try and do the majority from the inside, especially the key ones that are going to get the most use, like power plants, coolers, shield generators, quantum drives, the ones that get used minute to minute in the gameplay, which you're naturally going to find wearing out quicker or their sub-items blowing sooner. Those ones we want on the inside, but there are still ones on the outside that on some ships you need to get to. I think the Vanguard was the limit of how much stuff we could fit inside a small ship. The artists on that had a field day trying to get everything fitting in everywhere.
Like we talked about in the past, we're moving it more towards a gunship rather than a hybrid gunship/dropship because the Valkyrie and the Vanguard Hoplite have sort of taken the thunder out of the Redeemer's dropship capability. So we pushed the Redeemer all the way to gunship and we have done a little bit more reconcepting on it. So we've made it look a bit more Aegis.
TL;DRThe Redeemer concept keeps its familiar features but is simplified and made more uniform with Aegis styling, with extra weapons added, though this doesn't mean a redone ship is coming soon.
I mean, it still looks like the ship that it was. It was very clear from the start from Chris that he wanted it to... It was a fan-made ship, wasn't it? It was basically from, what was the competition called?
Yeah, that's it. So we've kept all the familiar features, so it's just been sort of a nipping and a tucking and, with the lessons we've learned over the last years, it's just been sort of introducing a little more uniformity with the styling of Aegis. So when people see it, it shouldn't be a shock. We've had to obviously put some extra weapons on and stuff.
So I think it was probably more of a little bit of a simplification in places, just a little less noise. And so, yeah, we've done quite a lot of work. So we've used the kit from... what was the one that you just mentioned there that Joe worked on? Yeah, the Vanguard. So the kit from that, basically just to sort of reduce the workload, and so it gives the artist more time to focus on some of the trickier bits, turrets, etc.
Yeah, I'll just caveat all that with: just because Paul's team has done some concept doesn't mean that we're suddenly going to spring a fully redone Redeemer out of nowhere. When we have more stuff to show, we'll show it and talk about it.
So the gunships in Star Citizen, they're less about dogfighting. They're more about sort of... I'm going to do the Chris arm-wave combat explanation. If it works. Our fighters sort of zip and zoom around all over the place, whereas the gunships tend to just stick on one path. They have a lot of weaponry that can point in a single direction or can converge on a single point, so they can just hammer around it. The modern-day equivalent is the AC-130 gunships that just hover around a war zone in a big loop; they can have all their guns on one side so they can just keep it all on target the entire time. And that's sort of what we have with our gunships. They have turrets, they have gimbaled weapons, and they can all align to one position to give a huge amount of firepower.
Yeah, the very old concept just had this singular door that came out of it and went around the bay, which you can still do. That's still there. You can still walk around the outside bit of it. It's not suggested, like walking around on top of a spaceship is never a supremely wise thing to do, especially if it's moving, but you can. There's now two doors, so you can get to either side of the hangar railings.
It's not in active production, but like Paul says, the concept's done. It's a recent concept, so it should be a pretty simple one to just... Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one. It comes down to priorities, time, and the resources available. On one of the many times we've come and talked about the process: it's finding a slot of time where we have the right amount of people, the right amount of time to do something that size. And if it will fit in there, we'll put it in there.
TL;DRNo commitment on the Banu Merchantman's cargo because work hasn't started, but it will probably go down rather than the ship growing, since making it bigger would limit where it can go.
I'm not going to commit to anything either way there because we've not started work on it. We want to do a bit more concept work on it with the lessons we learned from the Defender. For its size, I wouldn't be surprised if it has less than that cargo capacity. Similar case with the Carrack when it went down from 1000 to 480 or 450-odd. We've learned a lot since those early days. The metrics have changed. That's a lot of cargo. It will probably go down because the other way, of just making the ship bigger to fit that... it's already pretty big. So it's already like 160 meters in two axes, which is, at this point, the widest ship we have because of those wings. If we start making it bigger lengthways to fit that in, then it's going to be humongous. And then you lose the benefits. Again, for the same reasons we tried to keep the Carrack at the same size: you make those ships huge, you limit where they can go, and it's a mobile trading outpost. It needs to be more compact to fit places.
Yes. So it uses a lot of the same tech as the Prospector does. So it's got three mining cabs that use very similar multi-purpose... like they can mine and they can tractor beam. We had to do some code in the background to allow three mining beams to go into one cargo grid. But it does everything that the Prospector can do. It's got slightly larger... it's got what we're calling size two mining heads rather than size one. So they are stronger. They go further. They can do a bit more than a Prospector.
TL;DRIndustrial ships are more complex to concept because the challenge is making them interesting and new without being too wacky, balancing novelty against the familiarity Chris likes, as an early silly mining-arm design showed.
That's a good question. I think, I mean, the nature of Argo anyway is... it's a style that we all sort of enjoy anyway, it's that industrial kind of thing. So I guess it's more complex. I mean, the trick is really with this ship, we could have gone a really simple route and just turned it into a mobile mining platform, in terms of, it looked like an oil rig kind of thing, and it got some pods attached to it. But really the trick is how to make this interesting, right? How to make it into something that we haven't already seen before, because nobody wants that. That's always the sort of mantra: if it's been done before, we don't want to do it. But then there's always that familiarity that people like. Chris likes the ships to sort of behave how they should, how people expect them to be. If that makes any sense. And so it's just always that sort of tussle: how much can we push? How much can we shove? What can we throw in that Chris might like, that's new, but not too wacky. So we did have a really funny one early in the process. Remember Mr. Tickle? So we had it so that the arms... because you have the two mining cabs on either side and then one at the front. We wanted to give full accessibility. So we made the arms super long. So the one on one side could actually reach over and mine on this side. So we've got some really hilarious movies of just these huge arms. So it was named Mr. Tickle, basically. So it didn't stay. But I think where we ended up is really good. It's a cool looking ship.
TL;DRThe Caterpillar's doors don't lower fully because the transit and elevator system can't yet handle complex animated geometry; the team is expanding it to support multi-stop lifts, which would also improve vehicle loading.
That's an interesting one, because the reason they're out there, they clamshell open but they don't go all the way down, is because of a limitation with the elevator system we have at the moment, which we've not fully resolved, but we are on the cusp of improving, because essentially it needs to be a two-state elevator where the door opens, so you can have it like that, and then it goes down for the second one. The tricky bit is it has so much hydraulic piston work on this bit that our transit system, which you see in all the landing locations, can't deal with that at the moment. So we're having to expand the transit system, because the transit system is not just used for those trains that go between all the Lorville gates. We actually use it in the ships as well. So if you saw at CitizenCon, the Carrack has elevators, lifts inside with Building Blocks screens. Those are the lifts that have multiple stops, which is what we need for the exterior bit. But the current limitation is we can't do complex animated skinned geometry alongside that. When we do that, then we can get that. Then we can make all the ship doors like the Caterpillar main entrance lift, as well as a similar one where it's got a big piston system. And that means we can have grids on elevators, which means loading your vehicles in and not having them fly off into space becomes a lot more successful.
Any ships that have the Building Blocks, or have the transit system as their main elevator, will be able to now set up with the Building Blocks UI. So the Carrack will be almost certainly the first one that comes out with that, because when we've solved it all on that, that's our test case for doing it in ships. From a UI point of view, at least.
Yeah, that's something we need to do a pass on across the board, because we've got a very unclear mix of look at the door, look at the button, look at either of them, look at somewhere outside. And as we've talked about, Chris always wants things to be physicalized. So we will probably go to the look-at-a-button to open all the doors. We just need to make sure that button is clear. We don't want to open the door here with a button that's over here. Everyone's just going to get really confused by just standing in front of the door, hammering it, trying to get out. Whereas we need to make it clear if we're going to go that way.
TL;DRThe concept team does consider physical interactions such as button placement on tall vehicles, but it's a quality-of-life detail often missed under deadline pressure and they acknowledge they still need to discuss signposting.
Good question. I mean, yes, we have... like on the, what was the towing vehicle, the SRV. We sort of considered it on that. It's one of the sort of little things that does affect quality of life that often gets missed out, in terms of... with the concept, there are so many things to think about, to try and solve just generally bigger issues. And so the deadline is just getting closer and closer and closer. But in terms of just functionality, yeah, I mean, we are sort of trying to make it easier on the interiors. I mean, normally the buttons go next to the door and that's it. It's just, excuse me, when it's a particularly tall vehicle...
So, yeah, it's about how to signpost. If it's going to be on a landing gear leg or something, it's about how we sort of work it out. I guess we do need to have a conversation.
Any old Cutlass owners will remember the magical blue button on the rear landing gear leg to open up the rear ramp that people spent hours trying to find.
Absolutely. So you'll have different levels of sabotage. So you could just flat out... if it's a size one or size zero vehicle item, a small item, they're man-portable. So you could literally open the hatch, pull the entire thing out. Chuck it out the window if you want to be really trollish. Or you can damage it. You can shoot it. It will damage it a bit more, degrade the performance. Or you could just pull out the sub-items inside, which give a buff to the item's performance, which the player's probably used to using. So you take out all the buffs, then it starts going down, and you damage it a bit more, weaken it a bit more, just go around the ship tinkering with all these things.
You'll be able to restrict access. So with the security panel, you'll be able to say, I'm locking all the doors. Some joker's on board my ship doing something, so I'm going to lock all the doors. Then I, as the captain, will just unlock them one by one and go, nope, nobody in here. That's restricted to the main doors in the ship, not the individual hatches on it.
TL;DRCarrack exterior feedback is leading to some minor, easy-win tweaks while sticking to the release date, but the ship won't return to the original concept's thinness because that would mean cutting promised features.
We talked about this a lot in our CitizenCon panel as well, because we sort of preemptively knew that there would be a hubbub about it. So we spent a lot of time on it in our CitizenCon panel, which is now available. Even since that, there's been a few extra things that we want to look at just based on the feedback.
The lighting in certain aspects of the demo that was shown as well washed out a lot of the detail on the exterior. Actually, it was a lot more detailed than you can see on the stream, which didn't help.
We want to stick to the release date rather than go, let's spend another six months changing everything. We want to stick to that release date. So we're doing some very minor sort of low... I was going to say low budget.
I guess obviously you have two camps of people: you have the old school and the new school. You have people who like what came out originally and what was shown. Everyone always likes the thing before. I think it's just a matter of, for me, I'm just talking me personally here, I'm not representing anybody else, but there were some things that I think were missed off. There are easy wins that we can implement back in. And it's just, again, when you really drill down and look at some of the lines and how some of the surfaces interact with each other, there's lots of simple things we can do to bring it back, lose a little weight, and add what I think fans are sort of expecting on this ship.
It's absolutely not going to go back to the thinness of the original concept, because to do that we would have to cut features wholesale from the ship, and if it comes down to cutting the visuals a bit versus cutting gameplay that's been promised... Well, it's not even cutting the visuals.
Yeah, it's not going to be a massive... I'm not talking like I'm going to transform into looking like John Crew. It's not that kind of level of transformation. I can never be that good looking, but I think there's some easy wins in there for sure, definitely. We're going to do some firkling. Firkling, not finagling.
TL;DRCarrack pods are modular, but only the standard cargo pods are planned and committed for release; other types such as a science lab are only ideas, and the ship can fly without pods.
I can talk very high-level, loose, about the function. We build them as modular ones. The ones you saw in our panel and you'll see at release are the bog-standard cargo ones. They have an elevated gantry through them so you get more cargo underneath. In one of the earlier versions we had no gantry, and the SCU capacity of the Carrack at that point was low 300s, high 200s. So putting that gantry in gave us almost 200 extra SCU across the ship, which is good. But like I say, they're modular. So we can do other versions in the future. One we've thought about, but it's not going to come with the release, is a Ballista actually fits lengthways in those things. Squeaky, squeaky tight, but it does fit. So you can do that. There's been talk of doing a little science lab area. I think that was in one of the original texts that you and Dave wrote, perhaps, on the Carrack mini story. So a science lab on an exploration ship, it makes sense. You drop off a little science pod to do your experiments on the surface, and hightail it out of there. But for now, all we're planning and committing to doing is the base cargo ones. Like the Caterpillar, we'll talk more about those pods when we're at a point where we're actually going to physically make them.
You can drop off all three if you want, and you can still go around the ship because there's a lift at both ends of where the pods drop off. You don't need those pods in place to fly.
TL;DRThe Starlifter base variant will be worked on first, with the other two after it, either soon after or possibly bundled together in one delivery depending on how the base ship goes.
We're just going to work on the base one, the C2, I think, is the base one. I've got so many ship names in my head at the moment. We're doing the base one first and then we will do the other two after that. They may not be straight after it. They may be straight after it. It depends how the base one goes. And if for some reason that ship moves around in the schedule, it's probably because we're going to just lump them all together and deliver them all as one chunk rather than individually.
That really makes sense, to do it that way, kind of sequentially: get your core ship done, because you learn so much during that process that if you're doing all at the same time, you would just be redoing work multiple times.
Yeah, the A2 and the M2 have so much in common with the base one. You can't really start them before you've done the base one. When I say moving around or delivering more at once, I mean more that we would do all three, or do the C2 first, then the other two, and then hold them until one patch and give them all in one go, rather than the C2 in one patch, the M2 in another patch, the A2 in another patch.
TL;DRMineable scanning is currently locked to certain items, though some scanners may already be buyable for non-mining ships, which needs confirming; in future all ships might detect mineables with varying range.
It's correct, but I believe there are some items already that allow you to. You can buy some radars or scanners from certain shops that do that already, because I have seen people on Spectrum and Reddit using non-mining ships to detect them. So that is more of a gameplay...
A very similar answer is in the Pisces Q&A, which I recommend everybody checks out. So at the moment, I think it is locked to some items, but in the future, we perhaps want to give it to all the items and just vary their ability at doing it. So maybe all ships could detect mineables in the future, but maybe that's only 10 meters away for a really rubbish one. Whereas if you got the super duper turbo scanner, you could detect it 10 kilometers away, rather than buying 'this scanner can do it, this scanner can't do it.'
TL;DRNothing is active on the Endeavor; it needs new concept work because it's an old design whose metrics and door sizes no longer fit, so corridors would have to widen.
Again, nothing's active on it. It's one of those ships like the Carrack where we're going to have to go back and do a load of concepts for it because it was done a long time ago. The metrics may not be the same as they were when that was done. I can't remember who did that.
Was it Jim? Jim or George? I think it was Jim. But I think the overall style is good. I think it's just a matter of, can we walk through the thing, and are the rooms in it that need to be in it, and will they fit in that body?
Yeah, I love the older ships we've come to. We've found the doors are not quite human-door-sized anymore. They just come up to here. So as soon as you start fixing all the doors, then all the corridors have to get wider.
It depends on the ship. I mean, the Redeemer was quite a nice one, actually. Touch wood, for me, it went smoothly. But there are other ones that are just really quite tricky just because they're so sort of fundamentally broken, possibly. The knock-ons are just massive. And so it's always a little bit hard working on the older stuff because you've got to...
Yeah, there's attachment. And then it's also, okay, knowing where you can push, where you can shove. Because obviously Chris will have his favorite points as well. So we don't want to remove those by accident. And they shouldn't be fundamental shifts, but when things get larger or fatter or longer, then obviously the vibe of the ship changes. And so that can have quite a knock-on. So then it's, okay, how do we visually rebalance it?
Yes, they should all be fixed for 3.8 when that comes out. There were a few problems that we had. We literally were at the venue at CitizenCon on the Friday night, about an hour before we were pushing the 3.7.2 live build, and we found a load of problems with the Best in Show ships that we had to roll back to a previous version just to get the patch out, because we were ready to set QA off testing the patch, and we found this. The Caterpillar stopped flying, for example, which is a pretty big problem to have. So we had to roll them back, and then we fixed it again for 3.8. So you should see the vast majority of those bugs fixed. The decals are not quite aligned. The Cutlass has some of the fuchsia in the wrong place. So did the Caterpillar, and some of the intensities of them were not quite right, but that's all fixed for 3.8.
TL;DRShips carrying other vehicles will handle them as an item port, like the existing customization system, with a default vehicle that can be removed or swapped, and changes after spawning requiring a store and respawn.
So it's going to be identical to how you customize your ship through the VMA, PMA. It's just going to show up as essentially another item port that the vehicle is attached to. So in the Constellation and Merlin scenario, the Merlin would come attached to that item port by default. You could unattach it if you didn't want to drag it around, or you could swap it out for the Archimedes if you wanted to. Same for ships that carry ground vehicles. They would just have an item port in the ground that goes, I'm a ground vehicle item port, that's size one ground vehicle, so I can put in a Cyclone, I can put in a PTV, I can put in a Rover, that might be size two, but it's the same restrictions as we have on the VMA and the other customizations. So if you haven't spawned a vehicle yet, you bring up your mobiGlas, change it, and then when you spawn it, that's what comes in. If you customize it after you've spawned it, then you have to store it and respawn it. Or just load stuff in willy-nilly afterwards.
So yeah, this is another one that sort of fell into the 'we showed something and backers weren't too enthused' with the 600i, and we learned a lot for the 890. We said we're going to go back and do stuff to the 600, which we will.
It's dressing. I know there were a lot of suggestions for that central area where people wanted like a big glass bottom to look out the bottom of the ship. They wanted more windows. They wanted like a double-story shark tank or something like that. Just to make it feel a bit more customizable. The Touring one, especially. The Explorer has got some weird quirks that we learned as we went through. It will have a pass. Both of them will have a pass in the future, but it's not a priority to do.
TL;DRThe Hull C still needs docking, supersized cargo and runtime-transformable physics grids, plus a few months of art work; one blocker, the physics refactor, is now removed, and Squadron 42 can use it sooner.
So we are one step closer now to doing it on the tech side. So we've got rid of one of the blockers that we had. So now we're down to: we really need docking, which is a step closer since we fixed the last blocker, which is actually CR's big physics refactor that he's been working on and is now in the game. So docking is now a lot simpler to do, which really helps, because it was a big pain before that physics refactor. We need the supersized cargo done. We don't want to spawn a whole C with 4,000 individual SCU boxes. That's just going to tank the framerate on the server. So we need cargo to come in bigger than one SCU boxes, which benefits the game as a whole. And then the last bit, which the engine team will be working on soon, is allowing physics grids and vis areas to be transformable at runtime. So obviously the Hull C goes like that. We need that central spine area to have its physics grid go with it, because otherwise you're going to go halfway down it and then you're going to fall out into space. So again, those three big tech hurdles need to be overcome. And then we need a few months on the art side just to finish off. So we've got it essentially to final art, which is the 100% pristine version of the ship, done. Squadron use that for their scenarios that need it. So you'll see on the Squadron roadmap the Hull C's there, but I'm not sure it's on the PU one now, or they're on different progression amounts. It's because Squadron don't need the docking. They don't need the supersized cargo. They don't need to see it land; they can just get by with what we have. But the PU needs everything for it to function.
TL;DRSecondary movement does emerge from concept's drive to be new and interesting, but reusing existing assets is more efficient, so new animations or parts are used only where they're essential to the ship.
Yes, totally. It's always, like we mentioned earlier, it's always that: how do we make it cool? How do we make it interesting? How do we do something that's hopefully not been done before? And then, how do we make John's life difficult? So there's always a, hey, John, can I do this?
Interesting thing with the pipeline is that now that we have so much established stuff, it's always a little more efficient to go with what has already been done before, like reusing the seat or the cockpit from a previous ship and saying, this is a stylistic choice. But then at the same time, we always want to push ourselves and we enjoy the more interesting kind of diversions from that.
Yes, definitely. So I think you can get a little bit hamstrung, if that's the word, because you don't want to be creating extra work for downstream teams. But then there are just some vehicles that are just like, okay, we're just going to have to create something new for this. Because it's one of the main ingredients. So without it, it just wouldn't be as cool.
Yeah, there's times you just have to bite the bullet and you go knocking on Bender's door. You go, please can we have a new character animation for this super cool entrance. You never know what reaction you're going to get from that.
Yes. So we have that sort of on the Valkyrie, but it's set up in a less than ideal way. There are actually ledge grabs on there and it's something we want to do for the Cutlass as well. It's quite a way up. The Valkyrie has a little side step that folds down to enable it. On the Cutlass, you're going to have to be fit to jump up there to muscle up into the ship.
TL;DRThe current combat system is not the final intention; moving to time-to-disable needs physicalized components and a physically based damage system where impact energy and penetration weaken parts instead of draining a health pool.
What we have now is definitely not the final intention. Two big things to move to time to disable over time to kill. One, physicalized components, like we talked about earlier, so we have to have the items in the right places and be physicalized so you can target them. And two is moving to a more, I'm going to keep saying, physically based damage system. So something we've talked about in the past and we're still going to do it. So rather than bullets doing 10 damage, they come with a velocity, they come with an energy and a mass, and the game works out how much impact that is, which gives the penetration, which over time weakens the structure of bits of the ship rather than just ticking down a health pool. So when we have all that, then you naturally get items failing, which impacts other areas of the ship, rather than just, I hit the Gladius on the nose with my fist a million times and eventually it explodes. Whereas this will just be, you'll be hitting it forever and it's like your impact is not enough to do anything.
Yeah, I guess we factor that in quite a lot. I mean, there's always that discussion of what design want, and it's like, what's the ship's special ability or what's the hook? And so, if something has extra armor or can take a pounding, we generally try and put that in the visuals. So like the Terrapin, the Nautilus, they all have that sort of heavy feel. I guess we've got one maybe coming out soon that's got some of that too. So, yeah, that's always taken into account.
People have started doing the initial groundwork on it. So from a design side, we've worked out all the formulas and the parameters that we need and the materials that are going to impact it. We're in the very early stages of having some very brainy programmers work out all the math behind it.
So it's definitely slowly progressing. We don't know quite when it's going to hit yet, but it should have a pretty cool impact on the game when it comes along.
TL;DRHailing your ship from a runabout or vehicle seems like something they should do, but there's no commitment or timeline, and it would need to be built as a general gameplay feature rather than vehicle-specific.
Personally, that's something I think we should do. I mean, you can do it now with your Tesla and your cars. You can get them to come to you and turn on the engine and start. So it seems like something we should do, but it's not one of those things that I personally can go, yes, we're going to do that and we're going to do that next week.
Yeah, because one of the traps that people fall into is they think that this thing, like that example, using it on your vehicle, is a vehicle feature. It could be, but we need to build it in a way that the whole game can benefit from it. If we built it in vehicles specifically, you could be outside your research station that you've built with your Pioneer trying to talk to it on your mobiGlas, and it would just go, well, I'm not a vehicle, so I don't care. So it needs to be built with a general gameplay team so it works in all the scenarios. So I could be stood and call a hangar to open. I can call my ship to open. I can call my buggy to open. I can call my habs to change the air in them or do something.
TL;DRThe Prowler's shields are meant to work like the Defender's Banu-style ones rather than full phalanx shields, moving quickly around the faces and hardening to block all damage when a second person manages them.
So it's going to be like the Defender, where they're going to have not the full phalanx shield behavior, but a very... it's either unique or it's not very unique... a different behavior to our current shields. So the Defender ones, which I'm sure you can correct me if I'm wrong, are Tevarin inspired.
Borrow. They have a very quick sort of... you can move them around the faces very quickly, which sort of gives that phalanx shield, and you can also harden them very quickly, which, to get the best of, you need a second person sort of managing your shields. But the upside of that is they block all the damage. Unlike all the other shields, they block 100% of ballistic ammo coming through. They block 100% of energy ammo. So if you've got that second person doing that shield management job, you can do pretty well with them. And it's going to be that same sort of stuff in there in the Prowler for release.
TL;DRAlien ship art is harder than human ship art because it means pushing in unfamiliar ways, and the team says more work remains on the Prowler, Defender and especially the Merchantman, which is next after the Carrack.
It's tough. They've just been kicking our ass. Just by the very nature of them, they're complex, because me personally, I don't want to fall into that trap of, okay, so the race built their ship and their architecture and their cups and saucers all in this specific way. It's always nice to sort of have that breadth of their universe. Obviously with the human stuff, we're all familiar with it, so it's a lot easier. Like, okay, this is industrial, this is luxury, this is whatever. So we've done a lot of work, and we still need to do more work, basically. I think it is just tough because you're just having to push in different ways the brain just isn't used to. And I think where we've ended up for the Prowler is super awesome. We took what we did years ago, and we were time-bound at that point. We did the best we could. But what's happened to the interior now and how that sort of expanded in terms of its style is a real nice feature that we can put on any other ships. The birdcage.
The production side of the Defender, obviously, we talked about it before, it just took a long time just because the style on the inside is very different visually to the outside. The outside is sort of this beaten copper metal crab shell and the inside is like a full-on Giger-esque interior. And normally you just wouldn't have those two things next to each other, but we had to somehow make them transition without just looking like someone just slapped a metal shell on an alien.
So there's definitely a lot more work that we can do. It was either last year or this year, time just flies, we did a whole other pass on the Defender interior spaces. That's moved us along certain amounts, and now we need to do essentially what I hope will be the last round, where we properly define for the artists, okay, everything works like this. Engineering is like this, habitation is like this, lighting is like this, the materials are like this.
Yeah, because even though the Defender had helped set some kind of Banu guidelines, the Merchantman is more of a civilian ship versus the more military combat ship of the Defender. So there's differences there, in just so many more areas than you have in the Defender.
Yeah, and it's just knowing where to experiment, basically, what to push on, what to retain. So it's just that constant iteration and refinement. I think once the Merchantman comes out, it should be pretty special. But it's going to be complex.
TL;DRNo real status list is given; ships sit somewhere between not started and done, and with only about five vehicle teams working at once, some ships take a long time to appear.
I think a point here, and little notes from Jared, is just that we can't work on all the ships at once. I know there's a lot of ships that you put a big investment in, as a purchaser, a supporter of this one ship, and you can't wait for it to come out. And sometimes it can be a little frustrating waiting for it, but we are moving our way through the pipeline. We're seeing stuff come out.
Yeah, it is. Essentially, the vehicle team globally is about five individual teams. Those teams could be one person. They could be five people on a team. So at any one time, we can only really be working on five things. And given our quarterly release structure plus our Squadron requirements, sometimes you won't hear from us for a while. That's probably because we're doing something for Squadron or we're working on something that people don't know about. And if one team's working on Squadron, one team's working on a straight-to-flyable that isn't announced, that only leaves three people. And usually we're six to nine months, if not 12 months, ahead: the stuff we're working on now, you won't see released until the middle of next year. So there's only so much we can do at any one time, and things do change. It's a very fluid situation.
But I think the upside is that we're solving a lot of problems, aren't we? So basically when the ships do come out, we'll be maintaining that quality bar that we're trying to hit.