Hosmer, does the Phoenix still have its shielded cargo hold, the smuggler cargo hold?
TL;DRThe Phoenix has no shielded smuggler cargo hold; that belongs to the Taurus, which replaced its bottom turret with it, and the Phoenix keeps both turrets, so earlier claims were a mix-up.
I think there was some confusion with this, because I had to really go back and look through a lot of old documentation to figure out what happened here, why was this missing, and where did it need to be. And what I found was that the Taurus is the ship that actually has the smuggler's cargo hold.
Because the Taurus is missing the bottom turret. So the bottom turret space was converted into the shielded smuggler's cargo hold.
Exactly. So the Taurus has only the top turret, and then the bottom turret is replaced with a cargo hold. And then the Phoenix actually has both of the turrets, similar to the Andromeda.
Yes. This got confused in a couple follow-up posts. It actually started here on RTV back in 2014 when our very own Ben Lesnick was on the show. It's one of those things where we're talking about four different Constellations all at the same time, and some of our verbiage got confused. And Ben stated on RTV, as well as in a post on the old forums predating Spectrum, that the Phoenix had this shielded double-blind cargo bay, except that there's no physical space for it, because that goes on the Taurus, and it goes where the turret was missing. If you look through the original documentation that's on the original pledge page, the original brochures, you'll find no mention of the shielded cargo bay on the Phoenix. That was a feature of the Taurus. So this has been a common misconception over the last couple of years. We actually started clearing it up on a Calling All Devs a couple months ago, but we want to come back and do it again here. There is no special shielded cargo hold on the Phoenix. That is a feature of the Taurus. And we apologize for confusing the issue back in 2014 by mixing up our terminologies and stuff like that. But no, the Phoenix has the top and bottom turrets, which you can see there in the neck. And because it has the top and bottom turrets, there is no space for a special shielded cargo hold.