The ships in Star Citizen require functional interiors with room for things such as power plants and shield generators. How has this influenced the interior and/or exterior design of the ships which you create?asked by Odielthen

So, it influences both the interior and exterior, in different ways. So, smaller ships that don't really have interior spaces, the components that the ship carries influences directly the shape of the ships. So, the bigger a component, the larger that section of the ship has to be in order to house the component. So, good ships to look at that would have that would be the Hornet, the 300i, the upcoming new version of the Merlin, basically we have to shape the hsip to make sure that it can house all the components that its' supposed to house. So that's the exterior. For the interior, it depends on what components are going to be accessible to the player from the interior so, lets say for example something happens to your powerplant and you're on a Constellation for example, there's a space inside the Constellation where the player can go and interact with that object, which means we have to create a hallway that's wide enough for the player to go into, that we have panels that open up and there's enough clearance space and things like that, so the spaces will change in size depending on the things you interact with. So all the components will shape the ships in every way.

So I can't help but notice you had a little gleam in your eyes when you mentioned the Merlin. Can you talk about that ship and specifically where you started, and how you got to where you are with those volumes, keeping those volumes in mind?

Sure, so, getting the concept model of the Merlin, which I think is what's in Arena Commander right now, that's actually the concept model, that's not the final one, so I had to sit down and get all the components that the Merlin's supposed to house, get all proper sizes for them and then plop them into the ship, and then realize that none of them actually fits correctly, which means i have to go through a process of changing the shapes, making certain sections fatter, certain sections thinner, to make sure it all fits, and then once that's done I have to go through a pass of actually finessing the shapes, making sure it communicates the right personality and things like that, so I use, lets say, a Mustang or traditional muscle cars as inspiration for that, on top of making sure that all the components work, so yeah, we went through a lot of pains to make sure that functions, cause the Merlin is an incredibly small ship. You don't really have a lot of room to play when it comes to that, but we made it happen, and it looks pretty awesome.

You talk like a man who's been on your 10th date with the ship, and things are going well.