Art-wise, how has it been approaching the xeno ships versus the human-manufactured ones?

It's tough. They've just been kicking our ass. Just by the very nature of them, they're complex, because me personally, I don't want to fall into that trap of, okay, so the race built their ship and their architecture and their cups and saucers all in this specific way. It's always nice to sort of have that breadth of their universe. Obviously with the human stuff, we're all familiar with it, so it's a lot easier. Like, okay, this is industrial, this is luxury, this is whatever. So we've done a lot of work, and we still need to do more work, basically. I think it is just tough because you're just having to push in different ways the brain just isn't used to. And I think where we've ended up for the Prowler is super awesome. We took what we did years ago, and we were time-bound at that point. We did the best we could. But what's happened to the interior now and how that sort of expanded in terms of its style is a real nice feature that we can put on any other ships. The birdcage.

Something that was never there in the original concept and adds a huge amount.

Yeah, and the same with the Banu. The Banu took quite a while for us to get the Defender to where it is.

The production side of the Defender, obviously, we talked about it before, it just took a long time just because the style on the inside is very different visually to the outside. The outside is sort of this beaten copper metal crab shell and the inside is like a full-on Giger-esque interior. And normally you just wouldn't have those two things next to each other, but we had to somehow make them transition without just looking like someone just slapped a metal shell on an alien.

So there's definitely a lot more work that we can do. It was either last year or this year, time just flies, we did a whole other pass on the Defender interior spaces. That's moved us along certain amounts, and now we need to do essentially what I hope will be the last round, where we properly define for the artists, okay, everything works like this. Engineering is like this, habitation is like this, lighting is like this, the materials are like this.

Do you mean the Merchantman, not the Defender?

Oh yeah, sorry, the Merchantman. I was like, we're going to reconcept it?

Yeah, because even though the Defender had helped set some kind of Banu guidelines, the Merchantman is more of a civilian ship versus the more military combat ship of the Defender. So there's differences there, in just so many more areas than you have in the Defender.

Yeah, and it's just knowing where to experiment, basically, what to push on, what to retain. So it's just that constant iteration and refinement. I think once the Merchantman comes out, it should be pretty special. But it's going to be complex.

Once I can sleep again after the Carrack is done, the Merchantman is the next one.