Star Citizen Live: All Things Flyable

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

So the 890 fuel consumption is definitely a bug in 3.6.2. It's fixed in 3.7. It's a combination of the fuel intakes not regenerating as much as they should have done and the thrusters using more than they should have done. So it got into a state where it is almost never regenerating fuel. So we fixed that, which will help with that main issue. But also the setup in 3.6 Live is the worst possible case scenario for using big ships, in that we don't have the in-orbit or deep space locations to spawn these big ships. And we don't have the places in space to refuel the big ships. So to use them and refuel them, you have to go in and out of atmosphere, which is the most fuel-intensive point of any journey. And with the aforementioned bug, it was leading to very undesirable behavior. So fix the bug for 3.7, which should help things. And then as the rest stops and other locations come online in the future, that will help it be a more enjoyable experience. They're always going to use lots of fuel. They will be able to regenerate fuel if they're suitably equipped, which the 890 is. And then from there, it's just using analytics and balance tools to make sure it's performing where we want.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

The Constellation snub, it absolutely will. The Caterpillar will eventually, but it's more difficult because we have to effectively disconnect the thing that controls the ship, and then we lose the control of the ship. So it's not like two ships docking, it's more like a part of one ship. And getting that to work is a little bit more difficult, but we do want it to work and it will work.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, because there's sort of three distinct docking mechanics. There's only two on the roadmap. There's ship to ship, which is like Constellation and Merlin, or two other ships using their docking ports together. There's ship to station, which is, as it says, and then there's that side of it.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, which is, I guess you could call it composite ship docking. You've got ships in pieces, I guess. And the Endeavor would be the same.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, there's actually a bug. A bug that I have not been able to fix yet, but it's a bug, caused by the networking system, where the networking system for ships, we need to give control of the ship back to the server when you get out. And so when that happens, the server currently isn't being correctly told what the controls that you were giving it that were leading it to move. And so when you get out of the seat, the server is like, well, what am I supposed to do with the ship? And it just goes back to the default controls and then the ship will stop. But yeah, it's just a bug that we need to work through and figure out the best way to solve, and then it'll be fixed.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So not an intentional feature that when you get up, the ship just shuts down.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, no, that's just a bug.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

So there's no plans to add any additional turrets, but what will happen is some of the existing remote turrets will be automatically turned into point defense with AI blades. So they will function as the point defense. I think it's already got one or two more than the original brochure amount had, and that's what they're for.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We talked a little bit about this the last time the three of us were all together back in July when I was in the Wilmslow studio. So people understand, eventually, and you can actually check this out on the Shipyard series of articles that are available on robertspaceindustries.com. Literally, it's just on the main page. Just scroll down a bit, and you'll see a whole little bar with all the Shipyard articles about how this stuff works. AI blades will be a thing that you'll be able to install into ships in the future, and you'll turn those remote turrets into automated turrets, which are essentially the same thing as point defense turrets.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Point defense is sort of the old name that we used to call them by. People still use it, but yeah. Turrets will be able to be modified in the future. So a manned turret, you can man it with a human. If you don't have any human friends on board, you could hire an NPC, or you could use a blade to slave it to the pilot seat, or you could use a blade to automate it. And it's the same for remote.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So really what we've done is we've taken turrets that originally were only automated, and we've now given them the opportunity to be automated or remote controlled.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yes.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it's actually an upgrade.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Technically, yes.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

It's meant to replace hover mode in the sense that it is going to get closer to the goal that we wanted without the sacrifices that we had to make with hover mode. Hover mode was a really cool mode in terms of how it controlled, but it just turned out to not really be suitable for our game. There were just so many situations where it wasn't really ideal, and a lot of levels and ways we've set up things weren't designed around flying with hover mode, and so it introduced just a whole host of problems. So Proximity Assist will replace-ish, such that the VTOL animations that we currently have in hover mode, where you go into hover mode and it will automatically play the VTOL animations, that's now separated to a button that is a mode. It's a button that will be a button in the cockpit as well at some point, where you press the button and the VTOL thrusters rotate when you press the button. And that's separated from proximity assist, so you can have them rotated down without having proximity assist on. And then when proximity assist is on, it's quite a subtle system. It's very easy to forget that it's even there, which is how it's been designed. The idea is that as you're flying low to the ground and near stuff, the ship just controls nicer and more accurately. Unless you are really finely attuned to your ship's thrusters, you almost forget that it's there. You can think of it like an assist. It's just helping you fly low and close to things without flying around like you're a hummingbird or something.

There is more. There's one thing I want to mention on top of that, which is that there's a piece as well that we haven't got in 3.7 that will also be coming to help replace what hover mode was, which is the system where we are going to scale down the strength of thrusters in atmosphere. And that seems subtle, unless you think about the ramifications of that for a second and you realize that that's really significant. And what we can do with that is for ships, say, that have VTOL thrusters, we can set their efficiency curves such that they're barely able to hold themselves up in atmosphere unless they rotate their VTOL thrusters down. And so that is what gets us this not being able to hover on your nose with a ship that has those rotating thrusters, because those front thrusters won't be strong enough in atmosphere to hold you up. So you have to rotate your thrusters down and then you have to stay level. And then in space, nothing changes, obviously, because there's no atmosphere there. But yeah, that's an important component that I want to make sure is understood, that that's also part of this, because it may seem initially that we're making a backward step with taking out hover mode, but it's just us more carefully re-evaluating it and getting closer to that goal that we originally wanted.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Like I say, it will get us back to the goal of stopping ships moving around like hummingbirds, whilst also pointing those down. So we've done the first bit, which will reduce the hummingbird stuff, and the next bit will be that, hopefully without all the pains of hover mode, of all the ships being upside down or smashing into hangars or no-fly zones.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

It's something we're keeping an eye on. For the 890, a lot of its prowess is in its defensive capabilities and being able to tank that and just avoid combat, or avoid a long-duration combat. We can't just simply size up the guns because they're built to fit into those cavities on the ships and they don't fit in. If we were going to do an offensive increase, we'd probably quad mount the guns on those turrets instead, which would give you a similar effect. Also, those ships like the 600i and the Constellation are always being looked at in terms of whether they are punching above their weight class. But yeah, we're always looking at all the ships and where they sit against each other. And sometimes things need to change. Sometimes we just want to weather it a bit before doing snap changes to it. Because I think the Constellation originally, on those nacelle guns, was only size 3s, size 4s, and over the years it's crept up to 5s. And for a lot of our ships, just because day one when they were announced they said they had these size guns and these amounts doesn't mean they will always end up with those. If, at the moment of the game, they need to change them, we'll change them.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

I think name-wise, interdictors is probably the wrong name for those. They perhaps would go back to, I think we used to call them interceptors. So we'd probably look at changing that just as a phrasing, because, yeah, interdictors should really have the loadout changes that were suggested there. But in lore, they're always supposed to be better in a straight line, so like a real-world interceptor. They're designed to get from point A to point B fast, do some damage whilst everything else turns up.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

They would also, in terms of balancing gameplay above SCM speeds, have an advantage. So they're able to be more effective at higher speeds. Even though they might not have that different of a speed cap, they're just better at higher speeds.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, that's pretty much answered by the efficiency curves.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

I don't hate Drake ships. I think this is an unfair statement. Yeah, they've got a very conflicting statement in a lot of their original lore. For me, they are armored. They are tough. But when you compare them against dedicated military armored craft, they are weaker. I wouldn't say not as good. They're good in certain roles. You get into the trap that I fall into. So some of them are weaker by virtue of their design. The Buccaneer has one of its main engines on one of its very large, proportionally to its size, wings. So if you lose that, then that is a problem. But they're also armored appropriately for their role. The Cutlass is quite tanky. I think the Cutlass is, looking at the analytics, our second or third most played ship by actual time. It's a really good ship. It's there with the Vanguard, which is, if you're judging things purely on their armor, those two are pretty tough. And I wouldn't say the Cutlass is weak. It has other attributes to make up for it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

They are generally cheaper in terms of maintenance costs. They have fewer things on them. They have cheaper items to replace. They're often lighter and more maneuverable. And they do other things, like the Cutlass can carry a large amount of cargo. You can get a vehicle in the back of it. Other competitors can't really do that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think it could easily be argued that the Cutlass is probably one of the most versatile ships in the game right now.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, it's got cargo, it's got space for lots of people on board. You can solo it, you can multi-crew it. It arguably does everything.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I feel like it has a very large cargo area compared to its size.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, it's not that far off the Freelancer, which those two are always twinned in lore.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Nothing yet. We will talk about this when we actually start more production on the Merchantman, because I don't want to say something now and then it not happen. But there are plans. And some people have correctly guessed what it is on Spectrum and Reddit.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

So I wanted to use this question to talk a bit about the Vanguard variants in general for 3.7, more so the Sentinel. So it is not at release coming with a few of the things that it was announced with, one of them being the AR cockpit, the others being the decoy missiles and the e-war pod. And the e-war pod and the AR cockpit are tied together, in that we didn't want to spend time building these things from an art side without really fully knowing and having something demonstrable in game for those mechanics. So at launch, it doesn't have that cockpit. And when the mechanics are there, we will go back and adjust the cockpit. Same for the e-war pod. Decoy missiles aren't something we have in game, so it just has a regular missile loadout. And it does have an EMP device on it. So it was pitched as having, I think, EMP chargers. So it has an EMP generator pretty much identical to the Warlock at the moment, but again, we'll change and tune that as we go. And it has a very heavy, currently as I speak, all-distortion loadout, but we're going to look at that when it hits Evocati and PTU and see whether we need to adjust that. The Harbinger is pretty much as it was specced. It only has three size 5 torpedoes in the torpedo bay inside. We tried to fit more in, but really there wasn't enough space without doing even more work. It's got more armor. It's slightly slower and less maneuverable to make up for it. The Sentinel is slightly lighter and slightly weaker than the base Warden and Hoplite. And the nose guns, because people keep asking me about that: each of the variants now comes with different nose cannons. So the Warden comes with the laser cannons that have always been on it, the Hoplite comes with some ballistic repeaters, the Sentinel comes with some distortion repeaters, and the Harbinger has ballistic cannons on there. And then also in the shops there are distortion cannons and laser repeaters, so there are ballistic, laser and distortion cannons and repeaters available for all the Vanguard owners to play with.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

It's very hard to say. Looking back at the original design, because these are very early designs, there was never really a huge amount of design put into it and there were never any concepts for it. So we haven't really decided on how it ties in. I know there was speculation that the entire front of the ship would be shielded and you couldn't see out. That's probably not going to be the case. If I was to speculate on something, I would suggest the MFDs that are there currently would be all ripped out. The cockpit would be all holographic projection ones. And then there would be extra full-size MFDs, like you have on capital ships, like there is in the engineering station in the back, available to the pilot. But until we start doing anything, it's all speculation.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I want to stress that that's literally John Crewe sitting here right now speculating. Until development actually begins on the AR cockpit, until a designer is attached to that feature and starts to flesh it out, we're not going to be able to tell you concretely what it will entail.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, we didn't want to spend the time now just making art on speculation without the other gameplay teams doing their part first.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

We already have some, don't we?

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, we have some. I presume that is aimed towards the internal items. So there was work done this quarter by the US Vehicle Feature Team allowing us to spawn item ports inside object containers. So use the Retaliator, for example: if you walk around that, you can see items in the ship. They're simply brushes. They're not the actual items. So what that team's done this quarter, they've allowed that to be replaced with the actual items. What needs to be done next is actually hook them up to the ship control. At the moment, the ship can't see what they are. So if we swapped them over now, the ship wouldn't work, because it'd go, I've got no power plant, I've got no cooler. So that's going to be worked on next. And then when that is done, we can go through the ships and put the physical items in the right places. And then we can look at subcomponent targeting of all those items, penetration to hit those items and damage them.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think that's probably what the question is referring to. When will we reach the day that I've got three spare coolers in the cargo hold and I can go and rip out the damaged cooler, throw it away, grab one from my cargo hold and put it back into the ship?

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Once that's on item ports, that should be easy to do.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

The tricky thing was we could sort of fake it now. But what we'd have to do from the design and art setup side is guess in Max where the hardpoint for the ship item is relative to the interior and sort of line it up. And then it has weird problems. Those items would be lit as though they're part of the exterior. They would light them as though they're on the outside of the ship. So you'd have these either glowing or pitch-black items in the ship. And because they're on the ship, which you're in, but you're inside the object container, which is a different zone, all sorts of weird stuff happens. So they need to be items inside the object container, attached to the ship, and the ship talking to them for it to work.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I don't think that's an issue with continuous collision detection. It's more bugs with the physics grid inside the ship. It's just issues with, we have a class of bugs to do with physics grids and zones and getting entities in the right zones such that they interact with the correct physics objects and stuff. And so if there is, say, a bug with something like that, you can end up with something inside a ship grid, but the physics system thinks that it's on the outside, and then it doesn't interact with stuff on the inside and stuff like that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

It's one of those bugs that is not one person or one team to fix, because it could be the networking side. If the server's running at low FPS, then it's only updating every so often. It could be the actor side, or it could even just be a basic ship asset problem. We have had problems before where artists have set the wrong collision proxy on the floor, and it's good enough for players but not good enough for anything else. So whilst it may seem 100% to some players, it is not 100% on a single ship in a single place. So it takes a long time to dig down into it.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

There are actually other bugs that have similar causes. They just manifest in different ways, like particle effects appearing in the wrong place, or lighting being wrong on an item, or all sorts of stuff like that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Seeing the space dust from outside, inside your ship.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I suspect that will be similar tech to the Caterpillar detaching.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Some of them, anyway. Some of them, yes, definitely. The limitation on them at the moment is that pickable mission items can't be snapped into cargo grids. And cargo grids themselves have to be inside the physics grids of ships for them to be registered. So these ships that have them on the outside don't work currently. But I think a big thing that will help will be the inventories that are being worked on for FPS mining and other mechanics, where you will be able to sort of transfer your item to another item. It will be the same basic mechanics as that, but one scale up: you're transferring something that has things in it in your hands to another container, which will be the ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That'll allow things like the Stor-All for the Aurora, the cargo pod for the Hornet, the saddlebags for the Prospector, all those things that aren't in an interior physics grid, to be usable.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Things like the Hull C as well also need it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yes. Technically, you can already change them. You just don't have anything to change them with. All four variants come with different nose mounts by default, and they're all available in the shop. So if you're not happy with what comes with your ship by default, then you can go to the kiosks and swap them out for other things.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Are there geo changes with that?

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yes. They've all got unique geo. They've all got different audio and VFX.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

What does that do to the livery of the ship?

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

The guns themselves are generic, neutrally colored so as not to interfere with any of the paint jobs on the parent.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, definitely. But yes. Because that's going to be your bread-and-butter way of paying for it. These ships, just like the real world, if you own a big yacht, you've got very rich people wanting its use for a period of time, which most people would think is a silly waste of money.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Kind of the same class as the... I've forgotten the name of the passenger transport ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The Starliner.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Genesis Starliner. It'll be the same type of missions.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Two-part question. So first part, yes, we're looking at some changes to auto gimbals. They don't quite behave how people expect them to behave, so we're working on cleaning that up and making them more intuitive to use. That won't be in 3.7, that'll be in a later patch. Starter ships not being able to use them: obviously they have size 1 guns and there isn't a gimbal for it. In 3.7, we've broken our own rules on gimbal sizing, and there is now a size 1 gimbal mount that can attach a size 1 gun to it, specifically for those sorts of ships, so the Aurora, Prospector, Dragonfly, Nox. There's a few more. Out of the box they will come with this gimbal mount on, with the guns they had on it. So they'll be able to use gimbal assist straight away if they want, or they can stick to using fixed or gimbal. But yeah, that's a sort of solution for that. It's the only special mount that ignores that size restriction. We're not going to go through all the other gimbal mounts and go, here's a size 6 gimbal mount that allows a size 6 gun. We did it specifically for those size 1s.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And I'm trying to think of what the list of ships that will be able to use that is.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

There's quite a few with size 1s on them, the Hawk being one. But we decided not to put that on it by default, because the rest of the guns on its default loadout are fixed. And where possible, we don't want to mix fixed and gimballed weapons in the default loadout. There's a few exceptions, but by and large we try and keep them all either fixed stock or gimbal stock.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, this is one of those short term versus long term. This is like a big philosophical question. Short term, right now in the game, it may not seem like there is a reason to do that. Whether that's true or not is not for me to say. But long term, both players will then have the cost in terms of degradation, wear, maintenance, repair for repairing two ships, which is going to be twice as much as repairing one ship. Turrets are not where we want them to be. We're working on changes for that to make them more competitive. So in the Hurricane example, the turret player should be as effective as a person in the second ship. And also, not everyone is going to have all these extra ships to play with. If I, as a new player, just have a starter ship like an Aurora, and Dave here is Mr. Cool with his Hurricane, me flying along in an Aurora is probably not going to be as much help as a Sabre or something like that. So sure, great if you've got two players with those sorts of ships, maybe it would be better. But for the majority of the time, it's going to be much more effective for me to jump in a ship with someone else and help out.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

It's something we want to do. We're still looking at the data from the 300 series, because there's still a lot of activity going on with that. The short answer is there's a lot of development time on the asset production side that went into the 300. And we want to make sure when we do it again that we put our effort into the places that people actually care about, because there were a lot of areas that we as developers thought, that's surefire, people are going to love doing that. And then nobody did it. And the stuff we thought, well, nobody's going to do that, everybody did. So we want to make sure. We also want to do it on ships where it makes sense at a concept stage, and not just for new ships at concept, but also for some of the larger ships like the 890 and Carrack. When we start production on them, we're now doing a second concept pass to bring them up to the same standard as the current ships when they go through concept. We're incorporating customization into those stages. If that ship is something that is going to have customization at launch or release, we have the time spent identifying avenues there rather than having to retrofit it in.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

In general, there's a lot that we want to improve about quantum travel. There's a lot of stuff we want to do to quantum travel. On that particular question, I'm not so sure there's a quick, easy answer, because...

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

There's lots of things we can tune on it. I was reading something on, I think it was Reddit, earlier today. Someone was confused as to why they didn't have atmospheric entry effects anymore. It's because the quantum travel distance had been changed to put you into atmosphere. So you miss it because you're going through at the quantum spline jump speeds, which means you get closer to the thing you want to do, which is good because you're not spending as much time doing stuff, but you miss out on all those effects. And then it was a 50-50 split of people going, well, I like that effect. I want to go through that. It's an important feeling when you come to a planet, to come down through it. And that's been taken away. And the others were like, I don't care. I want to save that four minutes it takes to get there. So there's always going to be lots of back and forth. I think there is a bug the reverse way: you used to be able to quantum out of atmosphere much lower than you can now. When we were playing yesterday, you couldn't quantum out of ArcCorp until 80,000-odd.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think at one point the height that you quantum jumped in at was the same height that you could quantum jump out at. But that's broken at the moment. But yeah, you would be able to jump from a lower height. And we also had this issue, one of the hover mode issues that came up, that you previously used to be able to hover in the upper atmosphere and then point the ship at a quantum target and jump. But you can't do that because you can't have the ship not pointing level. So that'll get resolved.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

We're still changing. We're still tweaking. So the thruster efficiency thing is obviously a pretty large change for atmospheric flight. And it will result in a lot of the atmospheric balancing changing. Because obviously, if the thruster forces change in atmosphere, that means the drag values have to change as well. So we're going to rebalance the ships for atmospheric flight. And then we are going to rebalance the ships for spaceflight combat as well. We're just taking a little bit of time to solve some design problems with combat where we're not 100% sure how we're going to proceed. But once we're more confident about that, we will rebalance the accelerations as well, and the drag for atmosphere. We're also going to do stuff like, we have the ability now to control the drag in different directions to a greater degree, so we can encourage the ship to fly in certain directions in atmosphere by tweaking, say, the drag on the right side for a ship that's asymmetric, for example. Then you're going to have more drag in one direction than the other and stuff.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

So yeah, there's more tweaking to do. I wouldn't say there's some huge fundamental...

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

No.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Not like the change that we did with 3.5. There's nothing at that level planned.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

No, it's mostly balancing and potentially some smaller mechanics changes to encourage certain types of combat.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah. We want to get the combat closer, rather than being pixel shooters and people fighting at above SCM speeds, but we want to keep the maneuverability that we have at the moment. So you can dodge and maneuver and have positional combat, but at a shorter range, at slower speeds. And that's layered. That's not just IFCS or flight changes, that's changes to weapons, that's changes to perhaps shields and hit points on the hulls, and eventually that'll be physical, or just changes to how your ships behave at higher speeds to disincentivize you from trying to fight at those speeds, but using systemic methods to do that.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Part of the issue that we have at the moment is that it's balanced such that you end up at quite high speeds, such that you can't really change your velocity vector very quickly, and you end up circling around each other. And if the ships are forced to fly at slower speeds, that becomes less of an issue, because you end up closer and you end up able to change your velocity vector quicker, and so you get more movement in those fights and less drifting around each other.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We seem to be in a continuously changing sense where we're trying to find this right mix between wanting to give ships the speed and capabilities that they should have, while still wanting that close-quarters combat that I think we're all interested in. You want to be able to see the ships. You want them close enough that you can see the character and the personality of a ship in combat. It's an interesting challenge. We're definitely not there yet.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

It's an extremely hard problem, because it ultimately amounts to having realistic physics but not hard sci-fi realistic space combat. And so we're in that balancing act of finding that right middle point between realism and the combat that we want.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, Chris has always said, we'll take it to the point of realism and then we'll bring it back to the point of fun.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

And like you say, over the years we've tried different things. Some have worked, some have not worked. And I think we're getting much closer to where we want it to be, but there's still that last hurdle to overcome. Because in those previous examples when we've done things like that, the community always splits down the middle into: I love this, I hate this. The previous patch was better. No, this is great. And some of the benefits of this development style are that we can try these big changes. And then 'oh, the previous patch was better' moves one patch along as new people come in. It's an interesting challenge, and I think what we're going to be doing will help that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

No, there won't. That'll be, again, we'll probably tackle that when we go back to do the Sentinel stuff. There was someone asking about the Harbinger rocket pods. So by default, it will have some of the rocket pods that people have seen, the sort of swappable rocket pods that Delta has. This is also a size 3 one that has 9 or 18 rockets on each side. It doesn't have the reloadable rocket pods, but when we do the retractable turret bit, when it goes in, it will reload them there. Because if you look at the Harbinger concept, it's a very interesting mechanism it has there to reload those rocket pods. It's both a retractable turret, physically connected via a rocket reloading tube, and a turret that can spin 360 degrees. Following that concept would create something that does not work in reality. So we just put the generic or modular rocket pods on it. They are fixed, so you'd need to reload them. They are pretty spicy in terms of damage, but yeah, you'll need to go and restock somewhere.

I forgot to mention as well with that, the Sentinel turret, also, in the original launch of it, all the concept images had satellite antennas on the turrets. It looks like someone did their TV aerial on it. That is not happening with the Sentinel. It's got guns on it, which was also promised in the brochure and the launch pages for it. So when we came to do that, we thought, well, on one hand, we've said it comes with these satellite dishes. On the other hand, we've said it comes with these guns. We'll pick the guns, because that's the more useful side of the ship.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Great ship. Are we happy with it? It fills its role. I personally would like to see it have a bit more of a torpedo loadout. When it was made, six torpedoes was, wow, that's a lot of torpedoes. These days, it's not a lot of torpedoes, but the mechanisms for launching those torpedoes are fairly fixed. In a nice world where I had the time and the artistic skills and power to pull people off doing more important things to change it, I would probably swap them to be rotary launchers, like the Eclipse has and like modern-day B-52s have for launching cruise missiles, just so it can pack more torpedoes in there. Someone was suggesting whacking a size 6 gun on that the pilot controls. I don't think it needs that. That's not going to happen. Again, the turret question we talked about earlier: in the future, you'll be able to slave those turrets or automate them, which will make it a very different experience to how it is now. The other question that people always ask about is the interior layout.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The interior layout, and the shields aren't particularly robust.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

I think the shields are okay for what it is. It's pretty armored and tanky, Aegis. The interior layout, I think it's a love or hate thing. I don't particularly mind it. I could see why people don't like the interior in terms of the efficiency of space, but it's not like the Vanguard, where there were some big problems that we had to solve with it. It doesn't justify a full rework at this point.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, we've built the art for those, and the ship itself is ready to go for taking them. And what I mentioned earlier, with US Vehicles doing item ports inside object containers, also gets us one step closer to doing those, because those two bays are split already as object containers. And we'll be able to have the items inside them be set up. Where it falls down still is we have to move those missile or torpedo launchers off the actual ship exterior into those object containers. So I could now go back to my desk and split that all out, put them back in, and it will look identical to how it is. You just would lose control of those torpedoes, because it can't communicate between the two. And you could have modular swapping out of rooms, but the Retaliator would be really useless without its torpedoes. So that's why they're not there yet. But it is a step closer than the last time we talked about it.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

There are some plans. Not as drastic, though. It's not as bad as it's been, let's put it that way. And there are some bugs at the moment, particularly around disabled ships and damaged ships, that seem to make it go a little haywire. It gets confused about the direction that it should be helping you in. So we want to fix that stuff up. And then once the tuning for ships that I mentioned earlier is in, it becomes easier to balance them a bit. We're also doing some work at the moment on the actual weapon aiming systems to try and make the pips, the weapon aim, a little bit more consistent and predictable, and that will obviously have a knock-on positive effect on ESP. What else? There's one other thing I wanted to mention. Oh, the networking is the other thing. We did a lot of work around 3.5 to get the networking a lot better, and we did a great job, as far as I believe, and made the pips behave a lot nicer, just simply out of better networking of AIs and other players, such that the target that you're pointing at with ESP is moving more predictably and less erratically. If you get the theme, there's less work on ESP specifically and more work on everything else that surrounds it, because it's easily affected by other systems.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

It's only as good as the data that it gets. And if that data is not good, then it's never going to be good itself.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think in terms of the actual algorithm that ESP is running, it's way better than it used to be. It has a lot more emphasis on the dampening effect and less on the auto-aiming, which seems to be better than it was before. And we have a lot more control in how we control and tweak that now. So if we get to the situation where we've done some tuning and we want to improve the algorithm, we actually don't even need to change the algorithm that much, and we can tweak the values to get it a lot better without having to redesign it completely.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

I'm positive we will see updates to those ships. I can't say when.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's an Easter egg in some of the Nautilus imagery with the Blade that I haven't seen anybody notice.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Even after I heavily suggested it at the talk in Frankfurt, I saw speculation on Spectrum and Reddit as to what it was. And I don't think anyone actually noticed it. I had someone ask me on Twitter if I was just trolling people about it. There are changes. I thought it was going to be totally obvious. I can't not see it whenever I look at the image. I saw someone on Reddit get very close to it and then they were persuaded by other people that it was not that. And there will be similar changes to the Scythe and Glaive. Obviously, they are from an older period. The Vanduul aesthetic has changed at least twice since they were made. So they will be brought in line with the other Vanduul ships.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

Yeah, we learned a lot of things after the 600i released, from its reception, and during the development of the 890. So we're going to, at some point in the future, it's not a priority to go back and do it right now, look at some of the material and shape language and lighting especially that we did in the 890 and put that back into the 600i. It's not going to be massive exterior rework changes. I think the exterior is in a pretty good state. It's purely going to be limited interior updates.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, so this is a bug with the atmospheric system. It's caused by the center of pressure. So basically, we apply the drag to a point on the ship that is not necessarily the center of mass of the ship. It's used to create interesting motion effects in how the ships move in atmosphere. But there's a bug with how that is set in those ships, which means that when they get off axis and not aligned with the airflow, they get pushed hard enough that they oscillate to the opposite side. And then that drag force will essentially oscillate backwards and forwards and hold the ship pointing in a certain direction. So yeah, it's a bug. We can actually look into fixing that fairly soon. It's one of the things on our radar at the moment.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, it affects the Razor variants and the Merlin and Archimedes that I know of.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, the very light, small ships tend to be more susceptible to that, because they're easier for the airflow to push around when you're flying in atmosphere.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director / Vehicle Technical Design

And that is also highly dependent on the planet or moon you're on, because some moons have very little atmosphere and some have more. It's one of those things you hear about and you go, ah, it's not true. I just jump in, go test, no, went fast, no problem.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

And then you try Hurston and it's like, no, it doesn't work.