When designing ships, why is the pilot's view so often overlooked?
TL;DRPilot view was overlooked on legacy ships because it wasn't part of the pipeline, but it is now checked with screenshots at concept review, and the concept team is reviewing older ships.
Not anymore. For the legacy stuff, yeah. It wasn't part of the pipeline check. Now it is. We have the seats, the pilot, the camera goes in the pilot's head. We get screenshots in front and left and right. No more strut-gate.
It's one of those questions that comes up at every single first pass concept review: what's the pilot's view like? And we can accommodate and show them, and then they can say, oh, you need more space, or restrict the view, maybe, for the characteristics of the ship. So that's why we take that.
It's hard, because spaceships for other mass media, for movies, TV shows, comic books, video games, whatever, are never built one-to-one. They're never built to actual proportions and built out to direct specifications. So they can cheat a lot of those things. You look at the interior of the Millennium Falcon, you look at the exterior of the Millennium Falcon... I'm sure Disney had some struggles the last couple of years when they were building their life-size one down at Disney World. But those were some of those lessons we had to learn, quite frankly, the hard way, from those early days when we were concepting ships the same way you would for a movie or a TV show, and then getting in there, developing the metrics over time and seeing how these things actually work in practice in a one-to-one environment.
Yeah, and the concept team, they boot up the game, they go into ships, and they're sort of evaluating some of the more historical stuff. So they're very much on board in terms of fixing those issues.
And like you said earlier, the thing with the Terrapin view wasn't actually specific to the Terrapin. It was a global thing that was happening.
Yeah, there was one animation. It wasn't ever that the seat was designed to be that low. It was using an animation from another ship that was just incorrectly put on that ship.
I think the Hammerhead, the window at the bottom of the ship, that came out of a first pass review, because somebody said it'd be cool if you could see downwards, and then Paul's like, yeah, okay, I'll do that.