John Crewe · Vehicle Director

A lot of it is just how the pipelines got better over time. So if you look at a lot of the older ships, a lot of them didn't really consider component placement or metrics. The Redeemer is a great example of a ship that didn't adhere to metrics particularly well. So when we get into production, things have to change to fit. And for the Mercury in particular, the concept did a great job of fitting everything in, but it's been a year plus since we did that concept, and things in the engine update over time. So when that concept was done, we were only just dealing with landing gear compression. So the landing gear that were concepted worked fine for how the game worked then. But now we've learned a lot of things. We need to beef up the landing gear, change their position ever so slightly so the ship settles better. Because you can make a nice asset in Max or whatever, but until it's a physical thing in engine and you see how it lands and settles on its landing gear, you're never 100% sure how it's going to work. So we had to beef up the landing gear, slightly change the placement, and all those things knocked on to: if you have bigger, stronger landing gear that perhaps have a greater length, so you have better compression, so it lands easier, you need a bigger volume to put these things into the ship. So that then has knock-ons to the hull, because you need a bigger thing. You need bigger doors to cover the landing gear. They need somewhere to go. One little thing like 'I want to have half a meter more landing gear clearance' can have huge knock-ons to the underside of a ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Because we don't cheat our ships. They are one-to-one. The interior fits in the exterior, unlike the Millennium Falcon. I also have to imagine, and I don't say this with any information, this is just a question, the air ducts, the compartments, getting around, one of the features of the Mercury, that probably necessitated some further development, just getting the player model to crawl through there and stuff.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I would think so, yeah.