Star Citizen Live: IAE 2951 All Ships Q&A

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think the number one thing we get asked about a lot is NPC crews and duty cycles and things like that because whilst it is quite related to vehicles, like we obviously want to have NPCs in our ships doing things, we and specifically the vehicle coders are not the people doing that. We simply go, we will let someone in their seat have this role, but we don't control hiring an NPC or making them get in the seats and stuff like that. That's other teams. We make it work for a player doing that, and then other teams leverage that to make NPC schedules work around those sort of things. I think that's the biggest one for me at least.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

The most common one by far is, do you make the art? For vehicle system designers, we don't do anything with art. We assemble everything and get it functional. We follow the ships from the beginning of the lifecycle where we come up with the original brief and follow it all the way through to the actual release, but we work with every team to assemble everyone's work together to get the ship to actually work, function, and out there to the backers as a whole. So for me, it's definitely we don't do the art, but someone else may have a very different answer about the art. Ben Curtis.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I guess I'm the opposite of Mark, right? I get asked a lot, why doesn't this work? And I'm like, I don't know, we just make it pretty. So that's probably a lot of the time. When we get things in, they come through and we do a bit of a triaging session between us and work out who's responsible for what because even though it's a game that we're making, it can be quite complicated. And even ourselves, we sometimes get bugs and things come in that need more expertise than I have to work out where they should belong. And also I get asked a lot about props still. Like me personally, why is this prop not working? I look after ships now.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

Well, anything we do really in VET has more to do with how the ships feel, how combat plays out, and to some extent a little bit of input stuff. Anything that relates to what happens inside of the ships, like lighting and where sounds go and all that, that's all not related to our work. So we still just focus on anything that can shoot, but only from the outside, basically. I'm not sure if that's a good reply, but it's the one you get.

Chris McCoy · Senior Vehicle Designer

Yogi's is pretty close. I mean, essentially, with any seat that's in the ship, we've probably put it there. Anything that you can walk around and open up and get a drink out of, we've put it there because Art have put it in the reference and then we've gone, that looks pretty and needs to actually function. So I'm going to take a seat and I'm going to put that seat there and hopefully someone will sit down on it and not break it. Then when it breaks it, we fix it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

They bring the magic, basically. We make it pretty, and then they sprinkle some here, make it actually work.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

So the 600i rework is actually one of the things I've been working on. And when John asked me to go through it, we were happy with the exterior, the exterior looks great, but the interior just didn't line up with what we wanted to deliver from a gameplay side. So the interior has had nigh on a complete internal rework with huge amounts of features added to the ship. So it's still currently going through its interior iterations rework, but to give an example, because obviously there's not been much information out there about what's been added, removed, etc., it's now got a medical bed. So it's got a similar medical bed to the Carrack. It's got individual crew quarters. So for example, before it had that giant open area where there's just full little beds. So it's now got private crew quarters for each person. And the Touring and the Exploration version both have very different features inside them. So with the Exploration, you've got the medical bed, you've got a full-on armory now with places to put your suits, your weapons, and everything else, as well as a little bit more gameplay towards the exploration side, as well as a proper vehicle cargo hold to put much bigger vehicles and a lot more cargo in, as well as a much better flow through the ship. And then the Touring has been completely flipped on its head to lean completely into luxury guest transport. A big change to it was where we did the modularity as well. So currently the modularity was the middle section and that's been moved to the rear section to allow a lot more changes between the different versions. But it's not quite ready to show yet, which is why there hasn't been much talking about it. We know people really want to know more about it, and obviously the stuff that I've just listed off means people are going to have even more questions, but we're not quite there yet ready to show people. But it has docking collars, it has the external lifts, it has escape pods. It does have a lot of new additions, although the captain's quarters, with the exception of the bathroom moving from one side to the other, hasn't changed, because that was fine.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think it's on the note about, and going back to your original point about the roadmap, although this rework is on the roadmap, the part of the rework that's on the roadmap is what Mark's talking about: doing the investigations, getting a plan together. It's not that ship is in production and we're about to drop it. We're doing the initial part of the investigation of what we want to do. We haven't got artists that are actively working on this.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

For folks who saw the Banu Merchantman stuff yesterday, Mark as a designer is working on layout and where everything's going. But there's not a whole lot to it visually. When it goes into visual production, that's when it moves from Mark over to Ben's team, and that's where you'll begin to see the fruits of all this effort, almost certainly in an Inside Star Citizen, because that's what that show's for.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

Oh, without a doubt. You barely see anything, and we've been working on it, but as soon as Art get involved, that's when you actually see differences.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yep, they're still planned to be as they were pitched. So detachable, compressible bags. And that is actually another good example of something that the vehicle team isn't actually working on. That's actually going to be EU PU because they own mining, they own refining. So it's on them to deal with it. They're essentially items that will be detached from the ship, moved to another ship or station or cargo or whatever to do the refining and then passed back. We from a vehicle content side just simply make the assets in a way that they can detach and be compressed.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think there's two things really to talk about. There's the work for supporting refining and refueling, which is what we're doing at the moment. And that doesn't really have any impacts on the interior, the layout. It's all pretty much contained to either the bridge consoles, the rear of the bridge, the gantry at the back, and the fuel pods. And then there's what we want to do with it to fix all the issues we have within the interior, the layout and the flow or the lack of flow in it. So we're actively working at the moment on the refining and refueling side of it. You probably won't see it in 3.16, but you'll obviously see it alongside when refueling comes out. There's lots of changes there. And then we are going to start the process of, much like the 600i, looking at what we want to do with the interior of the Starfarer to sort that out.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The Starfarer, for folks who have followed the project for a while, was famously developed and pushed forward as early as it was because it's used in Squadron 42. But as you build these ships each and every year, you guys learn more and more about what it takes to develop a full one-to-one interior/exterior ship. The lessons that your team has learned about good flow, proper player flow and everything cannot be understated. The ships that come out today, quite honestly, if I'm allowed to have an opinion, have a much better flow and better player experience inside them than the earlier ones. So I think I can say to folks that our desire to go back and redo the Starfarer interior is just as strong as those of the players. It's just a matter of finding the time and the resources on the schedule because, like you said before, you have to balance that. You want a certain number of ships out every single quarter, every single year. And if you went on a certain number of ships, that would be the only thing you'd work on for some time. Then you have to balance that with the reworks and stuff. So it's not an enviable task. But I think folks can count on it getting done.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

So the gold standard work is any of our release ships that we're working on will get that incorporated in them. And a lot of it comes down to supporting features that have come online since that ship was released. That's probably the best way of describing what gold standard is really. It's going back in and making sure that the items are interactive that should be interactive. It's going back and making sure that things adhere to metrics correctly. If you take the Retaliator as an example, unfortunately, some of the corridor spaces were just a little bit too small to allow our AI to navigate comfortably through it. So we had to just go in and massage things around a little bit. It's quite delicate with our approach so that we're not changing the ships too much where possible. So things like making corridors a little bit wider or moving items around to make them more accessible for players and AI, that's relatively straightforward. Things that are a little bit more, I guess, is things like adding big airlocks to the side of ships that didn't necessarily have airlocks in the right position. And that's something that we've started doing on the Retaliator as well. We've taken it as far as doing all the interior changes. We just haven't got around to doing the exterior changes yet. And that's why we haven't really seen much from it. But the main part is just making sure the interactions work, bringing it all up to the experience level that we want. So dashboards and things like that work. And the items. Have I forgotten anything? One of the designers will jump in and tell me I've probably forgotten something.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Components is the big thing.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

It's also an opportunity for us to go back and change anything that we've decided needs to change as a result. As the game's evolved and progressed and new features and things have come online, the gold standard is the perfect opportunity for us to go in and correct things or improve things or just get things more where we want them to be. Something like the Sabre one, for example, there wasn't much needed to be changed from the interior point of view, but the 600i's on the opposite end of the spectrum and it's an opportunity to completely change what we have learned from this experience. And the Starfarer will be very much a similar sort of situation where we can take everything we've learned and move it forward.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And it's ever evolving as well because as new features come online, a gold standard two years ago might not have had the refueling ports in it or... I can't think of anything else. But as features come online, they get added to the gold standard list of things to do. The door screens that have all the lighting controls, they're all additional features that as they come online, we're like, oh, yeah, cool, let's add that to the gold standard list. And so we always joke about, oh, we've done gold standard, do we go onto platinum standard? How far do we go? But it's just that, I guess, ever moving line of where we want the game to be.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's probably also worth, Ben touched on it briefly, that gold standard doesn't necessarily mean full rework. Some ships will need that. The 600i's gold standard will be pretty close to a full rework. I mean, the exterior shape isn't really going to change. The exterior visuals beyond supporting docking collars and maybe any knock-ons from interior changes, but it's not like, put it all in the bin, start again fresh. And then you have the other end of the scale, like Mark mentioned with the Sabre, where pretty much the exterior work was just putting in the component hatches and doing a bit of material optimization. And it's everything in between that. We have a list of everything we want to do for gold standard, but that is not a time-boxed amount of time per ship to do it. It varies per ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think all in all, it's important that folks remember that a gold standard is not a guaranteed rework. It's essentially a review process of the ship to bring it up to whatever today's current Star Citizen standard is, as you said, as more features come online. Adding fuel ports is a great one. Going back to the ships and going, oh, all of these need fuel ports that we didn't know where to add or how, because we didn't know how fueling was going to work when we were building those ships, but now it's going back and adding those. So when folks see something like the Cutlass Black gold standard, that's not another full rework of the Cutlass. They shouldn't expect massive changes to the hull of the ship or anything like that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Correct. The Cutlass one off the top of my head will be, again, making sure the components have space, adjusting the cockpit so it's less wall of screens and you're actually sat in it properly.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

Yes. So anything we have in the weapon stats for now is just temporary and normalized to aid us with the general combat framework, so to speak. But we will add a lot of differences. Actually, the size 5 plus weapons, they actually have a longer range already. But there will be more difference between the weapons, also between energy weapons and ballistic weapons. So that's all ongoing, just not ready to be submitted yet.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

Long term, it's supposed to affect that. So, for example, if you have a cargo hold full of heavy equipment or something like that, then your ship is supposed to handle, well, less agile. But I'm not sure where the tech for that is. So the cargo work, as such, I'm not sure if it has an effect on the physical properties yet. Somebody else would need to take that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I don't know if it would be for the team doing cargo to confirm that. But I know from the IFCS side, obviously, if you put more mass on the ship, it will behave correctly with the extra weight. It's just the current cargo system just doesn't do that at all. If it did, then you'd have that behavior already.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

So currently the mass is just not propagated to the outside of the ship. The layer doesn't communicate with it yet.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

Okay, so yes. So there's two things here. So we want to have some ballistic ammo management and support things like that bigger ships can just use bigger ammo boxes. Right now, we can't do that. And because of that, we had to restrict the weapon loadouts or the ammo capacities in a lot of the Gatling guns and the cannons. This was more for balance reasons, and this is not the way it's supposed to be. What we actually want to do is to tie the ballistics gameplay closer to the physical armor gameplay, and once that physicalized armor gameplay is done, then we can reevaluate the ballistic counts again. That said, at the moment, the ballistic count is related to what kind of purpose the weapon has, and if the purpose of the weapon is to attack larger ships, it has more ammo. So, for example, the Behring Gatling series has a lot more ammo than the other Gatlings. But also that's all work in progress that will change over time.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

Yeah, I think so. We haven't tried it out yet. So we sketched out what we want to do, but we didn't have time for prototyping and testing it internally yet. But let's hope we'll approach that early next year, hopefully.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

So when the RAFT was actually going through its early concept and design stages, we went through a load of different iterations for what we wanted to do with the cargo, ranging from it being one huge giant pod that you put cargo inside, like the Thunderbird style, where you could put a vehicle in, drive out, or whatever, to putting loads of different ones on. But in the end, we ended up settling on the three cargo pods. And there's a couple of different reasons. The first one being that it's nice, quick and easy to pick up a pod, move away without any risk of accidentally hitting your other cargo containers. Another one is that it is an early starter long-haul vessel. And when we tried to jam more in there, it just started looking cramped and cramped and cramped and the mechanisms started looking more flimsy and flimsy and flimsy. And when you're actually going to be escaping from pirates at some point, you want to quickly be able to drop your pod and run because the pirate wants your goods, not you. So if you leave your pod behind and then fly off, they're probably just going to let you get away, which considering you don't have a lot of weapons, sounds like a good deal to me.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So it is still planned. I say this every time that people ask me. It's still planned. It's not something that we want to get rid of or just not doing it and hoping people forget it exists, which is what I see a lot on Spectrum. The big thing is there's a core tech blocker on it, which is the item port system needs to work within object containers, which it does at the moment, like ships have or stations have item ports inside them. The problem it has at the moment is object containers assume some sort of level of they are static, they're not dynamic. Object containers themselves can't move and they really don't like being deleted and undeleted at runtime. And the item port system within those would have to dynamically attach and detach. So we use the Retaliator, it's the really good example for this. And when we have this in, it will be the first ship that gets the modularity in game. The Retaliator bomber modules need the item ports for the torpedoes to be placed within the object containers, which the object container itself will be in an item attached to the ship. And we need the game to be able to read those detached and undetached events and link all the power and missile controllers to the items within those object containers. Because at the moment, torpedo items are actually part of the exterior ship CGA to make them work. So whilst we could do the modularity right now, you would never be able to get rid of those torpedoes in the ship. So you would swap out the room and have the drop seat room, be able to swap in, could do that right now. You'd just have these four size nine torpedoes shoved in the room at the same time as well. So what we're waiting on is the vehicle tech team to work on that dynamic detachment of item ports in object containers in items attached to ships. It's just a horrible nesting problem. And when we have that, the world's our oyster. That's the only thing stopping us from rolling it out.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And that's going to bring us lots of options to, rather than every new feature requiring an entire new ship, it's going to allow us to support the features, but still be able to spend the time making the ships that everyone wants us to make and not just being bottlenecked by, OK, well, we need to do this particular feature support, so it has to be a new ship. It just opens up loads and loads of new options, which is super cool. Because at the end of the day, some of our ships are quite large, and they could definitely benefit from having some more variation to them in their functionality.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

Personally, I'm really looking forward to being able to actually go back and do the module containers for the Carrack, to actually go a bit further with them. But like John's saying, at the moment, if we were to do them, the problem would be you'd still have whatever module was in the place of the cargo holds, the cargo hold would be there and the item ports inside them would be there and it would just layer on top of each other again and again and again.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Is this the same stuff that would allow us to do all the animations on the items within the ships as well?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

To some extent, yeah. So the Avengers, although the Avengers, I can never remember if they were officially true variants or modules.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Some were variants and some were modules.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It would allow us to have that be done properly rather than all being hard-baked variants.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So basically, it sounds like it's something we know what's necessary. We know what's involved in making it happen. It requires a pretty sizable chunk of time and resources in order to do it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, it's a lot of low-level engineering people. And the people that are best suited to doing it, unfortunately, are the people that are looking at server meshing. Because they're ironically the people that made the object containers and a lot of the original pipe system code.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's being worked on by the physics team at the moment. I saw a cool little video the last few weeks. So they are prototyping all the different aspects of it. So they've got little soft body deformation tests on vehicles, which is equal parts looking really cool and terrifying to me from the content side. And this week, in fact, we were looking at replacing the hit point-based part detachments with material-based and tensile strength detachments. So rather than you just depleting the parts of the wing down to zero health and they fall off, you hitting it and the tensile strength of the joint is reduced to the point that it would break off naturally. So it's being worked on. There's a lot of things there, and we're at the point where we've got all these prototypes, it's merging them together, and then looking at that versus our current pipeline and going, right, what's the best way to merge these two things together? Because obviously we build ships in a certain way at the moment, and not all of that is going to be 100% usable out of the box with physical damage.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's a big change, but it's absolutely central to so much of what Star Citizen wants to be. So it'll happen.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There's some of it actually in the engine already, but just disabled. So there's a CVar that we can flip that correctly generates the mass based off the material applied to the ship. A lot of physical-based damage is going to be based off the material types and surface types attached to the ships. So at the moment, design just goes, this ship weighs 87 tons. And the physics engine goes, I'm going to work out the volume of each part. Here's the overall volume. This overall volume weighs 87 tons. I'm going to split it equally between it. But it has no knowledge of what the part is. If you have a ship with what looks like a carbon fiber wing versus a solid iron wing, the engine at the moment goes, they weigh the same. Unless a designer goes in and specifically says, this one only weighs 100 kilograms, this one weighs a tonne, which obviously we don't want to do per part on every single ship in the game. That's not fun for a designer. So the new system looks at the material type. So when Art are making the ship, they go, this wing is made of metal. But yeah, there is a CVar in the game that we can flip, and then the ships look at the volume of the parts, the material type, and then work out the correct mass. I will actually say that the two ships we tried it on, there was actually very little change in the mass because they were correctly set up.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Unfortunately, I can't quite shift that one off. So AI blades is tied in with ship computers, or avionics, as they were called. People still call them avionics. And I think we only changed the name to be computers because ground vehicles don't really have avionics, but they have computers. That is on Vehicle Experience in their long-term roadmap. And that is making the computer item itself, which hosts the blades and makes the CPU resource for blades to use. And then blades will still be as we planned. They add in or modify functionality to vehicle systems.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's still planned. We still want to let players paint their ships in game. There will be physical locations in the universe where you have to fly to and get your ships or vehicles painted. We do want to let players pick their colors. But we're still working out how far we go. We still want there to be some exclusivity and benefits to having these pre-made paints. We don't really want to lock off specific colors. That gets very messy very quickly. But maybe specific finishes or stencil patterns that are exclusive to paints that you get rather than create yourself.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

OK, so the idea itself is not dead.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

It's absolutely something we still want to be able to support and give players the freedom to make their ships more their ships. I think at the moment we do produce a fair number of tints each year, in each quarter. The system is still very much in its infancy as to where we'd like it to be, or personally where I'd like it to be. There's still a lot we can do to just add more variation. We're making an entire universe. So not all ships should be grey and black. I mean, I'm a big fan of black. I love black, but I'll get in trouble for making every tint black. So, like I say, we don't want to be like, oh, we've made a blue and gold tint, let's reserve that so that only people that have bought it can make blue and gold tints. There's got to be more to it than that. We just haven't invested the time into producing that system that's going to be really accessible for the players to be able to do what they need to do. But it's not off the cards. We were quizzing Chris about it this week. I was on holiday last week and saw it blew up on Reddit and I'm like, oh my God, what is this video? Oh, okay.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Like Ben says, it's something we definitely want to do. And the tools we have internally aren't really where we want them to be. They're not quite giving us what we want. So the last thing we want to do is work on an in-game player-facing version of a tool we're not happy with and just let people suffer that and then have to change it all down the line. We want to be happy with what we've got first and then we'll work on the player-facing side of it. So the flow will be, like I said, you'll go to somewhere like Cousin Crow's and you'll go to a terminal and you'll purchase your respray job for however many UEC, and then whether it will be hex codes or RGB values or sliders or picking swatches, we don't know yet, but you'll be doing that and going primary this, secondary that, tertiary that.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

One of the things is you can look at a lot of other competitive games that allow this sort of customization to their vehicles. The thing that I struggle to get my head around sometimes is just the sheer scale of what we're doing. And by that, I mean, it's very easy to develop a system that works on much smaller ships. But then when you've got ships that range from tens of meters up to kilometers, you need a system that's going to be flexible enough, or we need to make rules and put rules in place that, okay, these smaller ships will allow a certain level of customization versus these massive great big ones that might not.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Another good point related to that as well is not all the ships are set up to take paints at the moment, so we want to make sure that all ships are equal in terms of painting, because the last thing you want is, I've got an Argo MPUV and I've flown all this way to a paint shop to find out I can't paint my ship. Or if I paint my ship, what I picked as red here is sort of a weird pinky color because there was something wrong with the base material. We need to make sure all the ships can do it all at the same time and it all applies equally, because as we've been doing these paints and tints for various events, we found, this looks really cool on these three ships, but the fourth one, for some reason, looks terrible. And then we've had to go back in and reassign materials and do lots of fun things just to get it to behave how we want. So we need that in place across the board for them all before we can even consider the player side of it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I didn't see the name, but someone just put something in the chat about de-orangifying the interior of their RAFT. And that's something that, again, we need to spend time investigating. From my point of view, I would absolutely love to be able to have control over the interior of my ship and make it all dark greys and moody. But it's something we're not able to do right now. I don't know, John, you need to get some magic tech people to sprinkle the magic dust on interior CGAs and brushes and everything else.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

That's another thing we want to do, customizing interiors. We tried it in a very obtuse way with the 300 series, letting you customize the interior when, in fact, you're actually just customizing the dashboard and it changes trims in the back because they're part of the dashboard. So we can do it. It's not a great way to do it. And it absolutely doesn't scale across larger ships.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And we've tried it internally using our tint system within our editor, but all it does is it just gives us another version of everything, the entire ship, and it's not able to do that in the client and in game. So we can prototype this stuff, but we don't have an ability to actually put that in the live product, which is a shame because I think it was the Starlifter we were playing with, and we started making the different variants and it was like, oh, this looks really cool in dark grey on the inside. But everything we need for the ship gets doubled. And that does not scale when we're trying to do hundreds and thousands of ships. It's just never going to happen, unfortunately.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Better not be. Want more racing ships.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

No. Pretty much everything we did for the flight model and also the upcoming stuff with the high speed changes and so on, this will have an effect on racing. And so, no, specifically for Rich, he was not here today, but he loves racing. It's really, really important for him. So he'll make sure that it won't die. So, no, it's not that for us.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience Team

So operator modes in general are very useful for us because they allow us to focus on a specific feature. And also for controllers or input purposes, it cuts down the amount of keys we need. So we will expand the list when we see the need for it. I mean, we split out basically, let's say, the guns operator modes from the missile operator modes, and the things we have planned for the future are at least EMP and QED, so you get separate operator modes for that. In my list, Salvage also appears, but we're not doing that, or at least not in VET, but basically any kind of other operator mode. So for new features, it's just really good to use operator modes because it makes a lot of things easier for us.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We were actually talking about that this week, ironically. It's something that we're fairly confident we can do now. We didn't do it at release because we just didn't have the tech to do it, but because of the work needed for the Hull C and its animated states controlled from the ship and controlling animated items on ships, it's doable. In theory, we just need to grab out the asset and actually have a go at it.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

But like everything else, it's time. By doing that, it's a designer not doing something else.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Did the space shuttle have windscreen wipers? I suppose it went belly in, didn't it? So it didn't go face first through atmospheres. I think 900 years in the future, we perhaps would have evolved past it and had space Rain-X.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There are definitely bugs with the current canopy effects at the moment that we are looking at. Something changed and it has wildly inconsistent results across all the ships that used to work. So some of them, the water and slush is the wrong size or it's going the wrong way or it's not appearing at all. So if you're offended at the moment by the amount of water and slush going across your canopy, it's probably not intended to be like that.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

For once, it's not just artists ramping up the wear to make it feel more real. I don't think it is anyway.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

The Sabre Raven is actually my favorite ship in the game for its visual appearance. I love that thing. Whenever we're doing the playtests, that's what I do if I'm flying solo. If I'm not taking passengers with me, that's the ship I go to and use. I know it didn't get the same level as the base Sabre with the gold standard rework, and a lot of people didn't understand why the Sabre got the fix, all the new stuff and all the new shiny stuff, but the Raven didn't. It's just because it was a separate model to work on. It wouldn't just be as you do one, the other one gets done, like some variants. It's straight up an entirely separate model, so it would have been double the time to do the gold standard. So it just didn't get done in time at all. It's not forgotten. I love the way that ship looks.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Same answer as what we talked about for the Carrack. That is theoretically possible now. We just need to actually go and do it. I'm not going to say what ship it is, but there's one in production where it's going to get trialed on.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Not really us. All I can say is it's definitely going to be a thing. And to start with, you'll be doing it from the ASOP terminal. So you go pick your Constellation and then pick, if you have a Merlin or Archimedes, which one you want in there.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That is probably on US PU then.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I keep bugging Rich Tyrer about parachutes or jetpack fall arrest systems, because it's really annoying that if you have to eject, you might as well have just stayed in your ship and died anyway, because you're probably going to die from hitting the floor.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

The Polaris had its full interior concept work done. We figured out the full layout. It's all there. It's all ready. We figured out the metrics for everything, what needs to go in. There's been some changes to the actual Polaris' loadout, but I'm not going to say more because, once again, we're not ready to show it right now, but there's been some updates to bring it up to scratch with everything else, similar to when the Merchantman had its revisit when we brought it up to the standards there are now. But I don't think now is the time to actually go into detail about it. But it's had some significant changes to bring it up to where it needs to be. I mean, as far as the concept goes, if I remember correctly, it's ready for development when we can find a slot, if I remember right.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Pretty much, yeah. I think one biggish thing to talk about on it was the original concept for it. The hangar was not quite to any of the hangar metrics, and now it is. So much like the Odyssey, it has a proper to-metric hangar, so it can fit a much larger range of ships in there. As much fun as it was watching everyone on Reddit and Spectrum getting Photoshop out and deciding what ships can fit in there, it is a proper size now, so it should remove that. And that actually got a little bigger. We always make things bigger, but it's not gigantic.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

When it comes to things getting bigger, I suppose I could say that it does have its capital shield generator in it now, because it did get some component increases as well, because that's one people are probably very curious about with it. So it has had its power plant, cooler and shield generator bumped up to capital level.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And when it does go into active development, which is when we assign 3D artists to actually start building it, that's when we'll begin to showcase it on Inside Star Citizen. You'll start to see some of this reconcepting work and all that. So again, it's had some recent work reconcepting, but it is still not in active development. So there won't be any new updates to give you until that time comes, until it crosses that line that the Banu Merchantman just crossed.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

We're looking at it with white boxing, pre-production. We've got some people digging into it this week and next week. Yeah, unless John shouts at me for saying that. But yeah, we've basically...

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Literally this week.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, we just started rolling onto it. I mean, I'm not sure when we'll first start showing it. It's, like I say, very early days, but yeah, we're on it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And then, of course, the Merchantman recently just began its white box. We showcased the first images of that last week. Other ships that folks are asking about, the Perseus, the Apollo, the Kraken, the Ranger, the Endeavor, the Genesis, those are ships that are not in active development yet, so there are no updates to give.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I know exactly who asked this because I saw it in the thread. I don't know. It's just something about that ship. Maybe it's the space farming ship that gets to me, or the absolute headache I know is going to hit us. Because it was before my time at the company, the absolute headache we're going to have with the modularity on it.