If female characters are smaller, wouldn't the smaller profile give an advantage in a firefight?
TL;DRSean Tracy says he doesn't want a gameplay advantage from character sex, so the Squadron 42 female physics skeleton matches the male, though hitboxes might later be averaged between the two.
It could. The thing is, the way physics works on a character is it exists on the skeleton. So yes, you have a conceptually smaller skeleton on the female. Now, it's not dramatic enough that I would actually even make a change between the male and female. And it goes back to what I was talking about before: it's an equality thing. It's not good to give a gameplay advantage just based on the sex of your character. I don't think that's fair, and it's probably prime to be argued whether or not that's the case. I tend to hate it. There were some MMOs that I'd played in the past where it was actually the best thing to do to scale down your characters to the absolute smallest you possibly could, so that in a mass gaggle battle you would be the hardest to click. I get it, but I don't want to encourage it. So basically what I'm saying is that I'd prefer, and it is the case right now in the Squadron 42 female character implementation, that the physics representation of that skeleton is identical to the male. So it's the exact case.
So, yeah, hopefully that answers the question. What is a little weird about that is that the hitbox does extend a bit past what you can actually see on that character. So we're talking a couple of inches, but it might be enough that actually we want to change some things, but we would probably make it so that we have a perfect average between the two. So you make the male one a tiny bit smaller and then make the female one a tiny bit bigger, so that they actually line up correctly and perfectly to each other.