[Given community expectations about what an Anvil or Aegis ship should look like, e.g. the Vulcan,] wouldn't manufacturers that have been around for hundreds of years have gone through different art directors and styles, like the Ford Mustang has gone through many revisions?
TL;DRPaul Jones says manufacturers keep a family look but it gets tricky across divisions, as with industrial Aegis ships that feel closer to Anvil, and designs often take a second attempt to get right.
Yeah. I mean, some manufacturers definitely have a more pure sort of lineage, let's say, and there was more variance in the design language in the earlier stuff. Now there's a stronger push for those core family features to run through. It's like you mentioned the Mustang or say Porsche or whatever. You can see that progression for over 100 years, something like that. Ideally, you want to see similar lines. But where it gets tricky, interesting, it's when you go into different divisions, essentially. You're going from, say, a passenger line or a passenger vehicle to something industrial, then that's when it starts getting tricky. You're like, okay, well, what do we take with us? You've got the badge and maybe you've got the grill. Then you can go either way, basically. And I think the Reclaimer and the Vulcan, that's why I sort of call it industrial Aegis. Personally, they're probably more Anvil to me than anything, possibly. I mean, if you tightened up some of the radiuses on the geometry, yeah, they're sort of a bit of a hybrid.
Even on the Aegis stuff, we've sort of gone from softer lines, the Avenger, the Retaliator, that sort of stuff, to the theoretically newer ships in the timeline, and they've gone slightly sharper. But yeah, it's interesting. It's a constant struggle, challenge, basically. How do you achieve all the looks of these ships, keep the family history, but still progress them, keep them fresh? There are times when, well, I say we, I've gone really safe on a design. Chris has just crushed it and just said, no, that's just way too boring or way too ugly. And we just had to go back to the drawing board. But second time, second bite of the cherry, you always come up with something a lot better.