Let's talk about what's in the pipeline right now. Not any of the secret stuff, the stuff that's unannounced, but as far as the stuff that the community already knows about, what is currently actively in development?
TL;DRThe Merchantman is still in progress with a skeleton team and no known release date, and may be paused; the Spirit, Lynx and SRV are in various early or later stages of development.
So we'll start with the Merchantman. That's the big elephant in the room for me. It's the big expectation. It's a very, very beautiful elephant, but it is very large. That's the one for me that has got the most unknowns around it. We're still actively working on it. Due to people chasing new adventures and slight priority changes, we've got a skeleton team that are currently working on the exterior. The exterior is progressing along well. It's gone through most of its modelling. We're starting to do material breakups and that sort of stuff and really defining the overall exterior shape. But we do need to look at that and decide whether or not now is the right time for it with the current team we've got, or whether or not we focus on other ships. So it's still in progress at the moment. When it's going to actually come out is completely unknown at the moment.
We're at a sort of crossroads with it, where the interior is white box, the exterior is further along, and we're at a point where we continue down the path and we absorb the amount of time that a ship of this size is going to take, or we, production phrase, put a pin in it and move on to something else which is going to be a better use of our time. So I can hear all the Merchantman owners screaming now. But it is a big capital ship. Maybe there are smaller ships that would come sooner that add better value to the game.
It's got to be one of the most complicated ones. It's the size of the 890. For being a Banu ship, the art direction style is so much more than anything we've ever done. Even with the 890, we had some Origin stuff to go from with the 600i. Yes, the style completely evolved over the course of the 890, but the Merchantman's not just a capital ship. It's an alien Banu Merchantman, a huge capital ship.
Pretty much every other capital ship in the game is human and is modular to some extent. You make one corridor piece, you've made 90% of the corridors in the ship. And with the Merchantman, that's not true.
Every corridor is unique. It needs that time. We could make it all modular. It wouldn't be what we want. It wouldn't be as cool. There's a fine balance. With every ship, we try and reuse stuff and we try and take the most sensible approach to it, but the Merchantman has very little to pull from. Okay, so, other end of the scale. We've just wrapped up the Cutter and we've just wrapped up the [Course?]. So those resources have freed back up. In terms of the people that were on the [Course?], they're moving on to doing some gold standard work on some Squadron ships that will eventually lead to that work coming into the PU at a later date. And then the people that were working on the Cutter have moved on to working on the Spirit. So the Spirit is in early white box. We're tackling the interior. It's all coming along pretty well. We're focusing mainly on the bomber variant right now. But we are making sure we white box the VIP variant, because the VIP one is the one that's going to cause the most headaches. It's got multiple floors in a small space. Got an escape pod.
I don't know if we've actually announced that yet. Oh, now we have.
So yeah, we have to work out the middle section, being the escape raft.
So yeah, there's a few technical and visual hurdles we need to tackle with that, so we're working through that at the moment. We're working on the Lynx. That's also in white box, again, early days. We've white boxed most of the interior and are going through the exterior at the moment. And although it's based on the Ursa chassis, I think the only real bit that's being reused is probably the cockpit. Even that will get some love. But visually, it's going to feel part of the same family, but will be a different vehicle altogether. We've got the SRV, which is going super good. It's trucking along for Argo. It's going through LOD Zero. I'd say about two-thirds of the exterior is LOD Zero complete in terms of modeling and material breakup and that side of things. And then on the interior, the cockpit and the engineering section are both progressing through LOD Zero, and it's just the habitation area that's still in grey box.