Because alien races have so much unique lore tied to their tech, how closely do you have to work with the writers during the development process? And is it super annoying?

It's only annoying when they tell us that we can't do things that we want to. I don't know, is it annoying for you guys?

How closely do you have to work? You're there at the beginning of a concept, right? At the beginning of the idea here?

Yeah, I mean, it usually starts with somebody saying, hey, it'd be really cool if we could do this. And then it goes from there. And we've had situations where it's like, this might not actually work for the Banu, but it is great for the Xi'an, or vice versa, or stuff like that. So yeah, we try to keep in contact as much as possible and make sure that everybody's work is being reinforced by everyone else's work, and we're not going out and saying stuff that they don't want as a direction. So it's a give and take with all the departments.

Yeah. Sometimes it's easier for us to create something on paper that we can present and be like, well, this would be really awesome for the Banu to do. And then it's up to wonderful designers to come back and be like, well, this is what we actually can do. And then we'll go like, okay, that's cool, but what if we did this one small thing? I mean, having the Defender be a multi-crew ship was probably one of the biggest things to come out of those discussions about how the Banu would operate and how they would want to be able to focus on specific things while flying around. It's going to be interesting to see how that affects... have you been planning out how that's actually [going to work]? Because the Super Hornet has, it's not a manned turret, is it?

It's a turret that you can take remote control over, yeah.

The seat's behind the pilot. So that kind of multi-crew fighter versus something like the Defender, which has, I think, more abilities, with those seats designed for sitting side by side.

Yeah, the co-pilot in the Defender is going to see a lot more action. There's going to be a lot they can do in terms of engineering, gunning, because they'll have control of the entirety of the ship's guns. So as long as you've got gimbals on there, you're going to have a very useful gunner on there with you. If you're putting fixed weapons on there, they might not have quite a good time and they'll be shouting at the pilot the entire time. But then because a lot of the ship items are housed on the interior, they can also get out of the seat and go and repair stuff if it's on fire while the pilot tries to get them out of danger. So yeah, it's super important to work with these guys dead early on, because, as an example, they might have envisioned something completely different than us. And once we get the design down, concepts already started, we might get a message from these guys saying this is completely the wrong direction that you're going with these guys and not well planned at all. So it's good to get everything knitted together early on.