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So you've obviously done some work on this prior to the show. You decided on some kind of external apparatus for the cargo containers?

TL;DRSarah McCulloch explains the external cargo container mount as a mag-plate-like system, inspired by farm machinery, that grabs and lifts containers to make loading easier and clearly signal the ship's delivery purpose.

Sarah McCullochVehicle Concept Artist

Yeah. So this would be almost what I imagine mag plates to be. And your cargo container could drop down on a hydraulic system and pick them up and then pull them up, so that loading is a bit easier for you instead of manually loading it with a crane or something like that. This thing can just come across, grab them and pull them back up to its surface, and then they can sit there and off you go with your precious noodle cargo containment and stuff. That's my thinking anyway on this: it's always, how can I make people's lives easier when we're making this kind of thing. And mag plates definitely do it for me for this, because these can be quite big containers.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

Yeah, because thinking about it, it would be easy enough to take something like a Starlifter or whatever and just load it up with a bunch of internal shipping containers full of Bennies. But if you're trying to design something purpose-built as a delivery vehicle, where it clearly says this is for this purpose, having this stuff on the exterior is probably one of the only ways to really communicate that.

Sarah McCullochVehicle Concept Artist

Yeah, that's it. It's just thinking about those little things that really do help with the design and making it feel a bit more solid rather than, as you say, loading things little by little. And because I live by a farm, I was looking at all the haystackers, and they've got these big bars that go across and it's all external. And so I was thinking maybe some sort of grabber or some sort of magnetic plate would be pretty cool. And that's how I came up with this idea, because there's a lot of farm machinery by mine. And that's how I get a lot of ref for a lot of this stuff.

Star Citizen Live›Intragalactic Noodle Delivery·
Published on this date.5 Jun 2020