Speaking of the Carrack, we talked about swappable pods during the presentation. Can you talk a little bit more about their function?
TL;DRCarrack pods are modular, but only the standard cargo pods are planned and committed for release; other types such as a science lab are only ideas, and the ship can fly without pods.
I can talk very high-level, loose, about the function. We build them as modular ones. The ones you saw in our panel and you'll see at release are the bog-standard cargo ones. They have an elevated gantry through them so you get more cargo underneath. In one of the earlier versions we had no gantry, and the SCU capacity of the Carrack at that point was low 300s, high 200s. So putting that gantry in gave us almost 200 extra SCU across the ship, which is good. But like I say, they're modular. So we can do other versions in the future. One we've thought about, but it's not going to come with the release, is a Ballista actually fits lengthways in those things. Squeaky, squeaky tight, but it does fit. So you can do that. There's been talk of doing a little science lab area. I think that was in one of the original texts that you and Dave wrote, perhaps, on the Carrack mini story. So a science lab on an exploration ship, it makes sense. You drop off a little science pod to do your experiments on the surface, and hightail it out of there. But for now, all we're planning and committing to doing is the base cargo ones. Like the Caterpillar, we'll talk more about those pods when we're at a point where we're actually going to physically make them.
So you could drop off all three pods?
You can drop off all three if you want, and you can still go around the ship because there's a lift at both ends of where the pods drop off. You don't need those pods in place to fly.
We haven't even looked at what the ship looks like without the pods.
Yeah, it's going to look interesting.