Designing the Carrack

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   Hi, I'm Gurmukh, a concept artist here at Cloud Imperium. And I'm Omar, concept artist at Cloud Imperium. We've been working on the Carrick for a while now. Uh it's been a long journey. The ship was originally started by David Hobbins uh a while ago and uh passed along to me and Omar to to wrap it up. Um Our major influences on this ship, I mean, it's an exploration ship, so Yeah. the the major influence for this ship was actually the Prometheus ship. Um We took a lot of uh design cues and and really kind of studied that ship to see the layout and you know, how a exploration ship is kind of thought of. Yeah, and how we can like bring it into

2. 00:00:48

   the Star Citizen universe. Right, exactly. Kind of make it similar to the rest of the ships. Mhm. Size and scale. So, the major Yeah, the major functions of this ship are for exploring, uh finding jump points, and different parts of the universe. Let me uh let me go through this exterior. All right, so in the front here we have a full glass canopy. Uh inside is a double-decker bridge. And the idea of this canopy is to provide minimal obstruction of your view in space. So, basically when you're the pilot in here or you're in the uh mapping suite and you are looking through the front windows, you know, you have a very small frame that kind of tapers out very thin. So, it's not blocking your view of what is going on out in our space and you're kind of feel like you're floating there

3. 00:01:35

   and you're actually not really in the ship. You're you're the the whole idea is to feel like you're just kind of in space and ex- experiencing that. But with the glass canopy, we also want to provide protection. So, um there's this garage door type shield that rolls out down tracks and covers up the majority of the glass. So, if you're flying through a a field or you're under attack, Uh you have this extra armor that will come down and provide another layer of protection. And then on the nose here, you have a large antenna array, and they're all for kind of helping to find jump point openings and help move your way through space. Then moving back, you have a docking collar to so that you can link up with other ships. You have information systems, you have intakes, you have escape doors. And it all starts to get detailed out. You're going to

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   have some drones launching launching launching pads for your drones. In the back here, there's going to be a smaller scouting ship that comes with the Carrick. And this is where you're going to land your The doors are going to open up, and you're going to land your ship. Then you have these antenna arms that kind of extend out. And it's to help kind of stabilize your ship before you enter a jump point. So, the antennas reach out, and they they kind of place you within the opening of the jump point so that you're entering it more in the center instead of cuz once you get into these jump points, it's going to be a rough journey getting through to the end. And then on the ends here on the wings, we got man turrets on each side. And these are more for broadside attacks. So,

5. 00:03:12

   the ship's very long. If you have If you're under attack, you know, they're going to be attacking you mostly from the sides. And so, those turrets are there for protection against that. On the bottom here, we have three modular pods that can be fitted as science stations, extra fuel tanks, potentially hold a cargo, medical medical stations. And these are pods that detach from the ship. And then in the front here, there's going to be a ramp that comes down, and there's going to be a scientific rover in there for driving along the surface of new planets that you discover. And then in the back, we have two very large engines. So, yeah, it's just all meant for exploration and long travel. We started designing by getting like or trying to compile a spec sheet since we

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   got such limited information in the very beginning. It was hard to kind of understand what the ship was doing, but as the project moved along, we were able to go to different departments within side the studio and actually figure out what does what, how things work, and what needs to be in the bridge of a ship. So, what would you want essentially inside of an exploration ship, right? You'd want obviously since it's a much larger ship, we decided to have three pilots essentially. Since it's also an exploration ship and we want to make it a little bit different than the other ships by making the view kind of almost the focal point. What's interesting about these seats is that they go all the way back and then they rotate cuz they have a track. So, you get on the seat and then it brings you

7. 00:04:47

   out so you're completely suspended and then it'll rotate out so it should give you a pretty amazing unobstructed view. You'd be able to turn off the HUD I assume on top of on the glass and all sorts of things. We knew we wanted it to be double-decker, but how was it going to work? Like the ship is big, but it's also not like you know, like a house big. So, how can we kind of make it industrial and functional and try to make the most out of our space? So, we decided to go with some of these motifs where you don't see a lot of like bars and banisters and trying to keep it as simple and as like unobstructed as possible. The view from the front of the ship, that's what's most important. Then I think what would be second was what we knew we had to have a mapping table and how was the mapping table going to work? Did it just project up? Did it project from the top

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   down? And that's ended up what we kind of went for was that it it kind of creates this volume in between the top and the bottom and there'd be like a some sort of display. So, yeah, and then you have access to certain systems like ventilation, water, and sorts of things by panels like this. Like if I hide that, you can actually see some of these things inside the ship. Like let's say a certain part of the ship is getting damaged and you need to make some repairs, you can probably repair it from here, at least monitor see what's occurring. And then we decided at pretty pretty late later on that the ship's if it's exploring, you know, who knows what the environment's really going to be like. So, it might be quite a bumpy ride and there might not be seats enough for everybody in there. So, we added these two kind of like flight attendant seats essentially. Yeah, so

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   it's pretty much just a designating like what goes on on what floor and what what makes an Anvil ship. So, to do that we kind of just kept like a little bit harder angles on things that might be rounded, little bit larger shapes, a little bit more industrial, but still cool looking and slightly simplified as not to distract from the main point of the ship, which is essentially the view. So, we had decided to keep the upstairs kind of like the meeting room, the mapping table, the little catwalk that you have here where you'll be able to project separate information on the glass. And then on the bottom, you know, you have people monitoring whatever they choose to monitor at these certain workstations. And at the very end, which is actually hidden right here, we have another monitor here

10. 00:07:12

    that would be displaying all the information that maybe the main pilot sees. So, everybody would actually know what's going on at what time by looking at this main monitor that stand so that sits in the back of the room. So, you're never at a lack of any information. So, you pretty much know what's happening at at all times and I'm sure as different mechanics of the game are implemented, these stations will adapt and change as well, maybe with eventually modular assets to help get more advanced and all sorts of stuff. And then, you know, like little bench and stuff for repairs in case something occurred and damaged inside the ship and that can retract and then we have storage as well. You pretty much have everything that you would need. And we ended up removing the What was those gimmicks? What are these things called? The escape pods {slash} beds, you know, cuz they're they're one in the

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    same. So, we kicked those off the bridge just because there's a place to sleep, but the reason why we had them originally was because if the bridge is getting attacked, it's why you would want to get out as quickly as possible. I think it looks a lot nicer, too. And uh becomes a little bit more functional, a little bit more homey because you want a separate place to sleep and to work and to do all these things. So, I'm actually really excited to to work on the rest of the ship and how each component comes together and works as like a separate piece. Hey guys, thanks thanks for checking out uh what we've been working on on the Carrick. And uh I hope you enjoy it. See you around the verse. Enjoy. Thanks, man.