What was the brief on the Buccaneer?
TL;DRThe Buccaneer was briefed as a tough, functional, compact all-purpose Drake fighter; Martin enjoyed the snub-fighter assignment, though his two-man cockpit idea was overambitious and wouldn't have flown.
The Buccaneer is, like all the Drake stuff, definitely utility. It's like a tough, functional design, and it needs to tie into the other ship designs, but this is going to be a compact all-purpose fighter. And for me, this was one of my favorite assignments on the game, because it kind of, again, channels my inner McQuarrie, and you get a chance to do a snub fighter. So did a silhouette pass, some quick sketches, tried to put some configurations together, started off with a double, two-man cockpit, which was never going to fly, but that was me getting a little ahead of myself.
I do remember that. We started to see two-man cockpits coming, and I remember going back to the design brief, and I'm like, did we type in...? Well, because you wouldn't have known this at the time, but around this time, we had just gone through this whole thing with the Khartu-al, where it was originally a two-man cockpit, and then design changed it to a one-man cockpit, but the art would have been two-man. So now we started seeing these coming with two-man cockpits, and I'm going back with the design stuff, and I'm like, okay, did I type something wrong here? And what happened? It was just Jim being... Jim got a little ambitious.
Jim got a little ambitious. He's thinking F-14. Yeah, this assignment is the fun fighter. Everybody wants to get the fun fighter assignment.
And it flies great in the game, because this was fast-tracked and put in the game pretty quickly.
This game has some great fighters in it. The Squadron 42 fighters are awesome. And this is kind of just its own kind of fun fighter idea that is, it's not the coolest one. It's the tough, old, faithful, reliable one.