John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So yeah, the plan was the Carrack team would move on to the Merchantman, but as we were coming towards the end of the Carrack, we had the team do a bit of pre-scouting of the Merchantman, and based on the work that we did on the Defender and all the problems we hit with that, which we discussed around this release, we wanted to spend a lot more time concepting it to make it a really solid ship. Because I know the Merchantman [backers] are known as super vocal about things. Looking at the concepts, you can see there's quite a lot of inconsistencies with some of them. I want to rule all of them out, have it all planned on paper, so to speak, before we start modeling it out. Paul Jones and those guys are going to be spending time tightening up the concepts, and then the production team will hit it at some point in the future. The Carrack team has essentially been split into two smaller ones that are working on two other ships.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We learned a lot of lessons with the Banu Defender about how to do the organic style design for the Banu as far as the ship. And I imagine there are a lot of lessons we had to take from that and apply to the Merchantman, which is a ship at a much larger scale.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, it's like we have with other ships. You can do a ship at a small scale in a manufacturer and we have an idea of how it's going to work at a larger scale, but it's not a one-to-one translation.