This ship utilizes drones and medical stretchers. How are they different from the drones we've talked about before, like the mining drones? What do these drones do and how do they play into the Apollo experience?
TL;DRThe ship's two drones are used only to rescue injured people, enclosing them in a protective field and delivering them to the beds, and they double as stretchers that can be pushed through the airlock.
At a functional level, drones are drones are drones. They can be controlled remotely or they can be semi-autonomous. But these ones are specifically designed for... I was going to say capturing, but that's probably an aggressive tone... for rescuing injured people, particularly in space where they're just floating around. So they can be sent out; they come out of the bottom of the ship and encase the person in this sort of protective field. Because obviously in space you might be in a cracked suit; you probably don't want to just be left in the void until you get back in the ship, so it sort of encases them. It goes back in the ship, and it's quite a neat system. I don't think we really showed it in any detail, but they go in the bottom of the ship and they sort of get filtered to the underside of the beds, and the drone attaches onto the other side of the beds, and they come up through the beds, and the beds all sort of open up to take them. Then the drone goes back down and leaves them on the bed. So it sort of makes a nice seal to put them in this sort of healing bed, and then they can go off and do it again. Obviously, if you've got six beds, you can fill it up with six people. You only get two drones with it, and they are just for that. It's not like the Vulcan's drones that you can repurpose into doing other things. They are purely for capturing and rescuing bodies. You can't use them to go up to another ship and rescue the missiles off them. And they are sort of the stretcher in the same way. So if they're not being semi-autonomous... unless I'm just speaking nonsense now, they are one and the same.
This is whatever you guys want it to be. In terms of the art style and the art and the design, it's fairly flexible.
Stop it being a remote-controlled drone, and it's essentially a hovering platform that you can maneuver on the planet.
One of the reasons that we put a big hump at the back with a big airlock is, if needed, if the drone can't be used properly, you just push it and go in.
It blurs the line between a drone and a stretcher. Is it a drone or a stretcher if it's being pushed by someone?