When somebody says, "I've got to create avionics," what does an avionics module look like?

Well, they're quite simple in terms of their premise. It's just essentially a box, and it's got a set of drawers which have the actual computers, the processors, and the guts on them.

I think a lot of our reference for those was taken from server blades.

Like hot-swapping kind of components.

Yeah, and even today's server blades are getting pretty sci-fi, or they're pushing boundaries of the aesthetics of them. And so that's where a lot of the inspiration came from, from that side of things. I mean, probably my favorite so far have been the quantum drives, because I think they look really, really cool. And the concepts are really cool. And I think the implementation, the artists that work on them have done a really good job of... the thing with concepts is concepts are all about making it look the part. We normally supply them fairly tight metrics to work to as well. I have to say that our concept team do a really good job of sticking to those rules that we've set out, because they are so important when it comes to putting these in each different ship. It's our job to take that concept and go, okay, well, this is what we want it to look like, but we also need it to function so that the character can actually fit their hand within these things, and make sure that there's consistency across all the different ship items. I think for the small ship items, we've covered five different types of item and there's between 20 and 25 per type, so that's just for the first five. Many, many more types, and that's just for smalls, and then we've got vehicle, mediums, larges, capitals and onwards. It's really important that we build consistency into them so that they work from a game point of view, really.

There's also the stylistic consistency as well between the different ship manufacturers, and that's one thing that Concept do really well, is convey the language of each manufacturer in the components, and they have proper branding basically. The outside of them is consistent with the brands.

So basically when you see a particular type of ship prop, you'll be able to see, that's a Wen/Cassel product, propulsion.

Yeah, totally. I think, was it you watching the Godi? That was really funny. So the Godi manufacturer, they've got a really strong brand identity. They were really good. Cory can talk about it. They're the good fun ones, in my opinion.

I worked on quite a few of the shield generators. They were probably my favorite thing to work on, because there was quite a lot of interesting curves and shapes to them. Considering they all have basically the same form factor between the manufacturers, they look so different. At first glance, you wouldn't really know that they all functionally have the same properties. Also, creating the variants was quite fun. We're given, with the concept, the color scheme for that manufacturer and for the different grades. So I should probably explain that as well. Each ship component comes with a set of grades, usually three or four. And those grades, you've got low grade ones, generally made out of cheaper materials, to the more pristine, using excessively nice materials and really high gloss finishes and so on. And you get the color scheme and you have to say to yourself, okay, how can I make it look consistent with this color scheme, but make it look cheaper? And then how can I make it look fancy?

Yeah, and I think that's something that's quite important, because there's a huge amount of lore in our game, and with these brands, going to that level of detail so that you can tell... because these are physical items in the game, you want to be able to, when you see them, instantly recognize, like you say, the lower quality asset versus the high performing asset. So I think it's a really nice and rewarding thing to be able to do, so that you can see that if you are increasing your ship's performance or your item's performance, we try and do our best to reflect that in the art as well.