Why don't we just make all the ships in the order in which they were introduced?
TL;DROlder ships are not done in introduction order because their concepts are less detailed and take far longer, so doing smaller, newer ships first is more efficient and teaches lessons for the bigger ones.
A few reasons. One, a lot of those older ships, their concepts are very, I don't want to say crude, crude is the wrong word. They're not as in-depth as the modern concepts are. So when we do concepts now, we do full interior breakdowns, full item placement breakdowns. A lot of those older ships do not have that stuff. The Carrack being a great example: it had a load of great exterior shots, and the only shot of the interior you had was that cutaway, which showed the bridge. When we did the Carrack, we had to figure out the rest of the ship. So the time needed to do a big old ship is way more than doing a new ship of the same size. It's not because we're trying to bury some old ships because people don't like them. It's just the efficiency of time. The more we do, the quicker we get. And it also gives us time to get concept support from Paul and his guys and girls out there to help us block out the bits we don't know.
Right. When you have one artist coming free, you can sit there and say, we've got one artist. Obviously, having one guy start on something the size of the Merchantman, with the scale of work on the Merchantman, is not very efficient. But you can take the one guy and put him on the Reliant variants, for instance. And so those get moved up, because he is going to be free, because his work is cleared up quicker.
And like I said earlier about the Polaris having the Bengal and the Connies to pull from, and the Carrack having the Valkyrie and the Terrapin to pull from, the same is true for the Merchantman. We're doing the Defender now so we can solve a lot of the artistic and technical questions on a small scale before doing it large scale. The Endeavor, if we tried to do the Endeavor... I can't remember which came first, the Starfarer or the Endeavor?
The Starfarer.
If we tried to do the Endeavor soon after the Starfarer, we only really had that one big MISC ship. And I know a lot of people don't like the layout of it. And I like to think that we've learned a lot about interior layouts since then. So the Endeavor could have turned out quite differently if we'd just gone, this is next in the line, let's do it now.