There were other struggles with the Mustang, things that were discovered through the playtesting of our players. The wings being the landing gear, for instance: if you got a wing blown off during combat, it was very difficult to bring your wounded bird in.
TL;DRThey wanted a starter ship to stay landable after losing some health, since the exposed wings meant little margin for error and losing guns and landing gear usually meant bailing out.
Yeah, and you know what, there are plenty of ships that share that, and it's not terrible to have on a ship, but it was something that we just decided that on one of these starter ships we kind of wanted to make sure that you could lose some health on the ship and still actually land it, still use it. Because on this ship specifically, you would lose almost everything, right? You'd lose your guns, you would lose your landing gear. At that point you just bail out, right? Just get a new ship.
You make a good point about it being a starter ship. So you don't want to overburden the player with too many of those challenges in what's supposed to be their very first ship.
Right. And the other thing too about the ship is the wings are a massive part of the profile of the ship, right? So if you're going to get shot, you're probably going to get shot on the wing and you're probably going to lose that first. And so there was just such little margin for error as a pilot flying the ship that it was nice to just be able to change it up a little bit so that if you do screw up, you're not losing total functionality.