John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Okay, so part of that is just how things work during development. A lot of the older ships, so Polaris and Perseus, for example, the actual concepts of them are in 3D, but they're very low-detail 3D, and then they have all the details painted over it in 2D in Photoshop or whatever. So when you actually come to put it into production, you don't have any of that detail. You put the corridor pieces in and they are just flat sections. And as any artist will tell you, that's not good looking. So you add these details, and the Perseus built on the lessons we learned from the Polaris, which we talked about many times before. We went with a sort of brutalist style approach to it, which we liked, lots of people didn't like, so we wanted to sort of course correct a bit with the RSI style. So the Perseus is a lot more detailed in those corridors, and you'll see more of that evolving in with the Galaxy, although toned down a little because it's not military, it's civilian. So things that were amped up have been toned back down again for the Galaxy, but it's all built from that same kit style. And you sort of need that level of detail to make it look good. You can't just have flat walls that are the RSI trapezoidal shape. It just doesn't work. So as you're in there, you need to build and add layers, whilst being mindful that it's not 'here's this wall section that I've made as an artist, and I want it to be the best wall section I've ever made in my life, and it's gonna look really great on my portfolio,' and it's repeated 30 times down the corridor. It just overloads everyone's brains and eyes. So you have that and then you break it up with lower detail bits just to give eye relief. At scale, you need more irregularity.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Otherwise, the repetition becomes far more in your face.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

When you have some of those corridors, it's less so the Perseus, but still you have corridor sections that are like five, six segments repeated. You need something irregular to break that up, otherwise it just looks copy-paste, copy-paste all the way down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's also something to be said about new people who have joined the project since a ship was concepted. People come to the project and they come with new talents, new skills, new experiences; technology improves from the time when something was concepted. And the idea that you just come in and just have to Control-C, Control-V something that was designed years ago, it's uninteresting to everybody. We've all learned so much. We've all gained so much experience. Of course, we're going to apply that to these ships as we build them. And that means changes will occur. I say this often: the ships that are made today are better than the ships that were made last year, are better than the ships that were made the year before that. So yes, they may change so much, but almost universally for the better. It's one of the few things where you can kind of just draw a line across: the ships get better every year.