You still couldn't help yourself getting [the Carrack] a little bit bigger, though.
TL;DRThe Carrack was shrunk because the earlier size caused problems, mainly for landing pad and hangar fitting, and gameplay is better for it; extended antennas and shielding may come back outside landing mode, but that is undecided.
Yeah, we don't just make things bigger for a laugh. It's generally for a reason. But on this occasion, we looked and went, actually, that's too big. We put all these things in and didn't think enough about the consequences of it. It was a hard battle to convince the artist to try and shrink it back down again. But gameplay-wise, it's significantly better.
I think there are going to be a lot of people that are very happy that we were able to keep it where it was supposed to be. So it still maintains the maneuverability, still maintains the performance, still maintains the crew complement, still maintains what they always expected of the ship.
I talked about the landing pad sizes. A lot of the ships we have in game, we try and get them into those landing pad sizes because of the complexities of spawning them in hangars. Like you see in Hurston and Lorville, we have specific hangars with a very specific size hole in the ceiling to get out of. When you're in landing mode, we need to fit into those sizes. When you're out of landing mode, you can go beyond it. So one of the things that was missing on that image was all the antennas and prongs sticking out the front, and some of the shielding on perhaps the back of the engines. We have to find interesting ways of getting the ship down into that volume for the landing state. Once you're out of that landing state, we can then bring those retractable prongs back out. Maybe the shielding on the engine can extend a little. Because I know some people were concerned that the back of the ship looked a bit squat because of the scaling we had to do. But that's purely to get it in that landing volume. And we might not do it. We may do it.