Do you remember a keen disagreement where you were making a vehicle of one manufacturer and somebody was really vehemently against it, [saying] it's not that manufacturer, it's got to be somebody else?
TL;DRThe panel recalls the Mule being debated as Drake versus another manufacturer, and the Vulcan drifting from Anvil, noting that designers shifting mindset between brands sometimes pulls ships toward other manufacturers.
Mule. Mule's an easy one. Kind of split the vote a little bit, didn't it? I think the functionality of the Mule leads more to Drake than necessarily... it is quite a high-end vehicle for Drake. It feels a little bit more refined, but a lot of the inspiration for the Mule came from what we see now in tractors and combine harvesters and that sort of thing. And they are very purpose-built, so they kind of tick that brief, but they are just a little bit nicer.
Melkor the Wise is like, the Mule is high-end?
Well, compared to Drake.
Yeah, compared to some of the other Drake ships. It feels more kind of Argo-y, in the sense it's, like you say, like plant machinery.
Yeah, if you look at the interior, the interior is all sort of moulded plastics, whereas if you look at the interior of some of our Drake spaceships, they're...
Very stripped back. Screens very basic.
Screens on the floor, helicopter seats, that sort of style.
The Vulcan concept was Anvil for probably 80% of its concept development, and then it got towards the end and we're like, it's sort of not particularly Anvil-y anymore. It's getting towards Aegis, and then the whole cockpit bit of it changed to be more like the front of the Reclaimer.
I think the Vulture looks more Argo.
Well, the big dirty secret is that there aren't 15 different manufacturers making all these. It's the people at this table who are making them. And so you've got to put your brain in, okay, I've got to put my brain in Drake mode, I've got to put my brain in Crusader mode. And sometimes the brain just doesn't want to do what you want it to do, and it will push you towards whatever these other manufacturers are. And occasionally that leads you to invent new manufacturers, when your brain just wants to do something completely different.
I remember just before I moved on to the Fury, I'd spent a little bit of time on the Corsair helping Lodit, and my entire visual library was just Drake. And then it's like, now you're doing a MISC racing ship that's kind of Mirai performance kind of thing. We weren't really sure which direction it was going to go then. And every time I modelled anything, I went square. I went big bolt, and Ben was like, no, rivets, metal, like chrome. I was like, okay. And every mechanism was more Drake-y until I remembered the direction of it.
You just referred to the Fury as a racing ship. Obviously, the two variants that we just released are not dedicated [racers].
No, no, I meant nippy, like they're fast and stuff like that.