John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

They're not specifically of the Vanguard variants after all this, but they're of the changes to the base Vanguard. So this is where we're at as of yesterday with the small tweaks to the base Vanguard pod. So this, if you imagine yourself stood at the top of the rear ramp looking towards the front of the ship, you can see that we've extended the pod out wider. So this was the dimensions of the pod before. We've done that for a few reasons. One, to make use of space. Two, to allow the turret to come down and not completely block access through the rest of the ship whilst that's happening.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Right, one of the original concept ideas was that that turret was retractable.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yep, and we're still looking at whether we can do that, but that's an exterior change, so we'll be looking at that once we're happy with the interior. But this is for getting in and out of the turrets, the mechanism. The bathroom is no longer the size of a small ship. The beds are the same as they are, and on the other side will be the normal Warden amenities. As you can see, slightly smaller bathroom now, without its frosted glass door. And next to it, we have lockers for storing your clothes and suits and helmets, whatever. So this is a big thing that we're going back through the ships adding, just like people have seen we've added weapon racks to some ships. Chris and Tony and Todd are very keen on having a physicalized inventory. So you have what's on yourself and you have what's stored on your ship or in your hab. And then there's your global inventory that you can send stuff to and retrieve it from different locations, but there's all sorts of others. Yeah, it's a lovely rack. There's two of them as well. So we're probably not going to put two on the Warden, because we've got space to move one of these elsewhere, but for the Sentinel and Harbinger, where the other side is completely taken up with torpedoes or the computer stations, we're going to double stack the things here so both crew can store their items on board. This is looking back: big change, double door on the back. When we started this process, we had a good look at the Hoplite and the Warden and realized the two externally had diverged quite a lot more than we thought. They're actually two completely separate exterior meshes, which means whenever we have a bug to fix on one of them, we have to fix it on both of them. So as part of this, we're going to be unifying the base mesh for all the Vanguards. And one of the good things of the Hoplite is the larger rear ramp and the larger rear door. So we thought, let's put that on all of them, because it just helps getting in and out. This side is still being fleshed out, but this is where your mini galley, food kitchen area is. And this is where currently the engineer station sits in the Vanguard. Moving on to the nose or neck section, the cockpit remains pretty much unchanged at this point. You can see we've put in these component hatches. So this sweet little GIF, depending on where you come from on the internet, shows how they all unfold, fold out, so you have access to the items. These are size two items, so they're not removable by hand, but what you will be able to interact with them on is opening them up and having subcomponents inside. And these are your sort of booster consumable items that you can customize per item to improve the gameplay of that specific item. So on small ships where they're size one items, you can pick them up. Size zero items, you can pick them up and change them out yourself. Two and three, you need to go to a repair station, because they are too big to handle by yourself. You might be able to have a little mini tractor beam to get them out, but chances are they're not going to get out of the ship. You have to go to a repair station. Size four capital items, they're permanently a fixture of the ship. So you have to go somewhere specific to get them repaired. And this is just looking towards the nose of the ship. I don't have a GIF of it here, but these steps actually now retract into here. And this opens up and another component comes out of the floor, because we actually ran out of space. Even with all the space around it, we were still struggling to fit everything that we had said in it, because the Vanguard has essentially double of all the core components, which is not a common thing. That's all I have for the Vanguard variants. It's not particularly variant-specific, but this is improvements to the base Vanguard that we're doing first, to enable us to not waste time with the variants.