Star Citizen | Behind the Ships: Argo MOTH

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   The Argo Moth is the long-awaited, much requested medium salvager for Star Citizen. >> It's supposed to fill the gaps between our small single siege salvage ships such as the Vulture and the Salvation, and the massive EJS Reclaimer. Small savage ships, they produce rubble. The large one, like the reclaimer, they produce construction material savage. And the medium ship, we create construction material pieces. The refining time for the rubble is the fastest. For the pieces, it's like in the medium part, whereas for the salvage, it's like the the longest refining times it will take. for crafting. The difference between the three different construction material

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   raw versions of it will be that the basically retaining the quality of the material. With the moth, we wanted to take our medium operator sized ships that we have already. We have them all. It's a great ship. And pivot that system over into salvage. >> Sometimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel. And we thought that building on top of the mole to make the moth made perfect sense. The mole is successful as a mining ship, particularly multi crew wise, due to the fact that it has all those turrets that can cover pretty much the entire 360° under the ship as well as around it. It's not completely full coverage, but it's pretty good. And the turrets have freedom of movement to really mine

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   anywhere. And that really lends itself to salvage as well, which shares a lot of that sort of similar mechanics. >> I think the mole is a very successful ship in what it's built for. So getting the opportunity to revisit it with the lessons we've learned and put some new life into it with a slightly different role and slightly different purpose was really exciting. >> And this allows us to iterate more easily on our current ships that are going out. But it also means that we can take some of those improvements and changes back to those original ships later down the line. >> We've tried to make changes where they were needed, but not make changes for changes sake. But the kind of like the standout thing, if I'm honest, is is it's the arms. >> What's your favorite aspect of the

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   month? Yeah, my favorite aspect is the new grinders. >> The giant munching arms that it's got on the front. They look great. >> They just feel kind of super chunky, super industrial, super dangerous. >> My favorite aspect of the ship is the grabby hands. They look really cool and give it a a nice quirk to the shape. >> Um, probably the grabby hands. >> Everybody says grabby hands. Why? >> It is such a key part of the ship's visuals cuz they're very big, very industrial. There's lots of weight behind them, but at the same time, there's also really intricate little details. >> I was trying to make them look a bit intimidating, like a bit dangerous, like you really wouldn't want your hands to be caught in anything. It was also very fun to work on the animations to kind of figure out how in the different states the arms would kind of retract, the claws would open up, big hydraulic

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   pistons kind of retracting, moving around, and yeah, of course, the crushers spinning. Are you aware that nearly a decade ago we had another system called Grabby Hands that has nothing to do with this? >> No, I I was not aware. What was that? >> Discoers. It takes a crew of four, so far fewer than you need for the reclaimer, but it actually gives you some multiplayer gameplay as opposed to the vulture. All four of those players will be able to take part in the salvage gameplay loop. We have three manned turrets, each with a size two salvage head, and the pilot gets access to the main

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   structural salvage crusher. >> Can the ship be operated solo? >> Yeah, like like all our ships, it can be operated solo, but if you operate a ship solo of a certain size, you get some downsides to it. It would just be a lot of dancing around between the different seats, but at the same time, you're also going to be saving some time because you're going to be able to carry a lot more. So, you're going to have less trips back and forth. >> What kind of uh defensive capabilities got? >> Very minimal defensive capabilities. This is first and foremost an industrial ship. The pilot has two S2 slots available to them. The co-pilot gets access to a bespoke small missile rack with 16 S2 missiles.

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   The belly of the ship has changed quite a lot. We've now got this large split cargo grid that is in a vertical orientation. So when the salvage material is projected out, it blows straight onto this large cargo grid that kind of takes up the majority of the belly of the ship. One of the improvements over the mole chassis is the fact that the cargo grids are just normal cargo grids. Whilst the salvage output does automatically eject onto them, and it does use standardized ASU crates, there's nothing to stop you putting any other cargo compatible item on those cargo grids, which allows you to then perhaps do a bit of cargo. Maybe you find some salvage on the way that you want to do. It doesn't limit you to doing one or the other. You do have the ability to do both at the same time.

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   The rear of the ship has a really nice cargo lift for two 16 SCU containers, so you can get a bit of hauling gameplay in there as well. And just in front of that is the old personnel lift. Both take you up into the newly sort of slightly re-imagined cargo area. From there to the left and right, you've got the entrances to the side salvage turrets and then a ladder that leads you up onto the main deck. One of the things we realized as we were working on the ship was to be able to get out some of the components out of the ship. We needed to widen the doors and widen the ladder down to the lower floor. And this gives a nice route through the ship to be able to get those ship items out. to the rear of the ship. From there are the beds and

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   the bathroom and a couple of suit lockers. And then forwards from habitation is into the processing room. We basically took the pre-existed engineering room from the mall and converted to a processing room. >> Feels very hot, very industrial, and a little claustrophobic. You have an engineering screen in the middle. Some of the components have been sort of reshuffled around to make space for a big refinery which is on board. >> Forwards further still is the bridge which has the pilot and co-pilot seats. As we kind of revisiting the cockpit, we've updated it a little bit. So, we've brought in a few new interactions, kind of modernized the view a little bit. things like the dashboard improvements,

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    the interactive panels that we placed around the ship, those sort of things will kind of be retrofitted back onto the mole as well. >> Like the Asgard and the Hermes, the Moth is a new hole based on an existing chassis, and that means it doesn't share paints with the mole. But we are making some really nice new paints for the Moth. So, we're going to have a lot of two-tone paints coming in. So, you'll see that we have decided to spice them up a bit. So, we're excited now that we have the full set of salvage ship sizes. We have you starting with the Salvation, moving to the Vulture and Fortune. Now, we have the Moth, and then ultimately you end up with the Reclaimer. >> It was very fun to work on. Very nice to work on something industrial. >> Just the little changes to the flow that we've had to make, opening up some areas just to allow a little bit of a smoother kind of gameplay experience has been

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    really nice. This is for the person who enjoys salvage gameplay but wants something bigger.