What do you see as the role of non-fighter snub ships, like the Carrack's scout?
TL;DRSnub ships are meant for short recon and scramble support rather than long-range travel, and the Pisces is promised some interesting exploration-themed features despite having no quantum or jump.
Scouting. I can't go into all the details specifically on the Pisces, but I do actually want to just call out that, even from sitting in the chat and reading on the forums, to everyone who is concerned that, hey, because snubs don't have quantum and jump, my Carrack explorer snub craft may not feel worth it, that will not be the case. Absolutely planning something really cool for the Pisces, so that it's going to feel like the just badass explorer companion vessel that you're hoping would come with the Carrack. It still won't have quantum or jump, but it will have some really cool stuff to counterbalance that, and I'm hoping once we get that ship more into production and can talk about that, you guys will be happy with it.
I mean, it comes down to what's the point of a snub fighter to begin with. It's not to do long-distance travel. It's not to do long, high-endurance engagement. It's to do short recon and to do scramble support. So it will be useful for those things.
A larger ship's scramble support should be massive, because they're going to have larger weapons, and so they're not going to have a lot of small little weapons. You have a couple of small ships going against a super large ship, they can just keep picking away at it and flit around. Death by a thousand cuts.
We're already seeing the balanced strength of being the smaller ship in some cases. So being able to be both the bigger and the smaller ship has a tactical advantage.
Also with that, one last thing is not all snubs are implicitly fighters. So there's the Argo utility vehicle that comes with the Idris, and that doesn't have guns. That is very much a utility craft. It's got a pod on board that it can do some different multifunction things with. But that's also going to apply where we'll have snubs, so like the Merlin and the Archimedes are more higher-speed, higher-maneuverability snub fighters. The 85X is going to be this luxury two-seater snub for taking off and landing from planets that the 890 Jump may not be able to land on. The Pisces will absolutely be an exploration-themed snub with suitable capabilities for that. It's just having a purpose to everything and making sure that it lives up to that purpose.