Around the Verse: Episode 2.32

19 May 201600:59:161,459 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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This week, tech designer Calix Reno takes us on a tour of the updated Caterpillar White Box in Ship Shape. Archivist Sherry Rhymeberg explores the Tamsa and Min systems in a two-for-one Lore Maker's Guide to the Galaxy. And we continue our look at the continuing development of the pipe system in part two of the ATV Fast Forward. All this and more in this week's Around the Verse. Who knew that intergalactic food
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delivery could be so dangerous? Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Around the Verse, a weekly look into Star Citizen's development. I am Sandi Gardiner, VP of Marketing. I'm Ben Lesnick, Director of Community Engagement. And he's back. I am back. Um, hi everybody. Yay, and is that a new shirt? Uh, yes, that that is maybe a new shirt. Who knew? Who knew what you could buy on the East Coast? But more importantly, um, I'd like to thank the Star Citizen community for all the support they gave me the last 2 weeks. Um, if you you know, Ali's father passed away, my father-in-law, and uh, we had to head back East. Uh, it was very sad, but we we just got love from just everywhere in the Star Citizen community. Folks sent flowers and best wishes, and it it
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really meant a lot to me. Um, just genuinely thank you all. Um, of course I want to thank the folks here who kept everything going without me. As you see, I'm not necessary to the equation, uh, cuz Jared and uh, Hennessy and uh, everybody uh, just did a fantastic job of keeping things going. I'm not sure that's entirely true. We We are happy to have you back. I think Jared was about to fall apart, but he he's still just hanging on. Um, so it is very nice to have you back. I'm good. Very happy to see you again. Yeah. And of course I want to thank my uh, folks who stepped in for me as co-host. Um, Forrest and Jeremiah, you did a fantastic job. So much so that I couldn't tell you apart because I I can't see the forest for the leaves. Aw, no. I'm back, baby. I was thinking I need to make a pun, but
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I don't know if I can make one that bad. While you were away, Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 went out to the PTU and our first wave of testers, the Evocati, are doing a terrific job providing bug reports. I've heard great things. It sounds like that program's working really, really well. Yeah, I think it is. I think all the the reports are looking quite exciting. There's been a lot of polish and bug fixing this past week and the hope is that it'll be available very very soon. In other news, those of you who who participated in the Prospector Sale Create-a-Minor event received a $5 coupon last Friday. So, if you haven't received that already or you maybe didn't check your mail, go check it out. And that $5 coupon is our way of apologizing for taking so long to award the winners of the contest.
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Some of you may have heard there were 35,000 entries and we don't want to leave anybody out. So, Jared, myself, Tyler, Sandy, everybody has been looking through your pirate stories or your Starfarer stories and there's some great ones in there and we will be announcing the winner on Friday on our TV. And we've got something new coming to the Play Store that you could also use the $5 coupon on, which is the Drake Buccaneer concept sale for $110 on May 27th. You got all the details, so there's nothing else for me to say. The Drake Buccaneer is our uh our kind of second take on the Cutlass idea. It's the the more maneuverable, less cargo-oriented pirate ship planned to be around the same size and
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scale. So, we're really looking forward to adding that to the lineup. Uh everybody loves Drake ships and I think Jim Martin who did the concept for this one really knocked it out of the park. We cannot wait to show it to you. And let's not forget our subscribers. What is this month's subscriber flair event? This is a space plant month and specifically this is a space cactus month. So, check out the space cactus. That will be available in your hangers as soon as 2.4 goes live. Cool. Do I have to water it? No. No, cuz it's cactus. That's true. You're not really Well, still, once a month maybe? I guess not. And I saw you were recently featured in GameStar magazine. Very exciting. Yes, um, this month GameStar magazine has a, uh, the first part of a retrospective on Wing Commander. Uh, that's the largest gaming magazine in Europe. Um, you can pick it up in
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Germany or other German-speaking countries. Uh, and then this next month, it'll go on the stands at the end of May, there'll be a second part to that as long Well, as an interview with me. So, uh Well, very cool. Uh, from time to time we like to, um, highlight one of our fan-created events. Um, and recently members of the MERK organization had their first big gathering of about 70 people. Looks like a fun group. Here's some of their photos. With that, now let's check in with our
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studios from around the world and see what's happening in news from around the verse. Hey everyone, my name is Lenny Vasquez. We're coming from Los Angeles and this is Eric Lengyel. Nice. Eric's new here, actually. This is your what? Second, third day, maybe? Second day. Nice. Second day. So, you know, we always like to build new people. So, what are you doing for us? I'll be mainly a technical animator or associate technical animator and I'll basically be implementing animations in the CryEngine in the system motion capture shoots. Nice. Nice. Who are you Who are you going to be working with? I'll be working with, uh, Shawn Tracy and Mark. Nice. Mark McColl. Nice. Good peoples. So, in the news real quick to recap, we have 2.2.4 working really hard for on
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the engineering team. I know Gage has been working on a lot of bugs also for like the clothing and stuff. They're just probably working with them cuz like all the rigging and everything that's going into the animations and everything. Some of the artists working on the caterpillar still. They're doing a lot of work on that. It looks amazing. Can't wait for you guys to actually see it. And then clothing, which I just mentioned with Gage is working on and other people working on. Garment's actually going to be helping out with some of the environment concepts and item 2.0, which is a big thing that we can't wait to show you guys even though it's really back end, but hopefully we'll be able to talk about item 2.0 and everything that entails soon. We'll have some on that. And of course, here with Eric and we'll see you guys in the verse. Take it easy, guys. Hey guys, Jake Ross here, producer of the Austin studio, and I'm here with you
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this week to talk a little bit about what's going on here in Austin. I wanted to first talk about a little bit of 2.4 stuff. We're We're updating the inspect weapon animations. We have these a shop in 2.40 called Cubby Blast on ArcCorp and then Livewire weapons on Port Olisar. And these shops they are where you go and buy your weapons, your personal weapons. So, when you go into the shops, you're able to actually play an inspect animation. So, you can kind of see what you're what you're buying before you purchase it. But, the weapons that we had in there, they weren't really doing it for us. They were they were a little strange and the the camera was moving around a lot a lot of like what we had with the original release of the emotes. So, we went ahead and went in there and and updated those animations. Now
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they're they're a lot better and they they kind of fit more with what we were going for. So, we've updated those animations. Those will be in the game soon. We wanted to get the shopping experience as polished as it can be before we put it out to you guys. So, so there there's that. On the persistence side, we're now we've now able to support rentals and promotions. So before we had you know persistent items that persisted go figure and we we didn't really have a an elegant way to handle things like rental items or promotions like a free fly weekend or things or things like that. So we kind of revamped the way we were doing that and handling that. So now we're able to better handle more temporary things that aren't supposed to be persistent over long periods of time. So that work was done on the back end by Jason Ely. So um
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and it's in the game now. So handling rentals and promotions a little bit better which is good. Lastly looking ahead to future releases we're looking at some more shops not for ArcCorp and not for Port Olisar but for a new space station that will be sort of a pirate based space station. So this this space station will be more for the kind of the outlaws and things like that and but even outlaws like to buy things. So we have shops there in um in in the works for for this new station and it'll have it'll have different shops that will that'll be able to sell different things. Um you know you'll probably see some some more kind of outlaw armor types and
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some pirate clothing and and more weapons and things like that. So we're trying to get you guys to to travel to different areas and give you incentives to to go hang out at different places and and and and we'll we'll have a wide variety of things in the PU. So this is you know the first steps is getting shopping out to you guys first release and then after that we'll look to put even more content out there to get you guys flying around the verse. So Um yeah that's all I got for you this week guys. Thanks and I'll see you around. Hi everyone. This is Mickey over in the UK. Today I've got Stefan Alstrom with me who is a senior VFX artist here at Foundry 42 and he's going to be showing us what he's been working on. Yeah, I've been working on weapon VFX mainly for the S5 bearing cannon to
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laser thingy and then Amano Reese company has a really cool plasma shotgun thing. Mhm. So we're going to have a look. So this is the bearing laser cannon. One of the Yeah, a really big gun. It's a says Starfarer Gemini thing that it's shooting from top turret. You can tell by the recoil it's very powerful. those guns are huge. And this is the Amano Reese company scatter gun. So it shoots like eight projectiles sort of a shotgun style thing. They're going to be more visible in the future after we sold out certain bug. They're very magical. Yeah, almost like a unicorn fart, don't they?
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But and I put them on a saber ship just to see how it would look like on a ship. Disclaimer here because I don't know if they actually will go on a saber. But if they did then it's what it would look like. It looks pretty cool. So yeah, that's the latest. That's cool. So what is the future plan for these things? Projectile impacts. So when the weapon hits different surfaces, say we want to have a different effects for water and snow, glass, dirt, everything like that and even different metal types. Because the more detail you can be the more immersive it is. You don't want to see the same hit effect every time you shoot something. So I have a lot of work to do there but we have a great system
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in works for that. So, yeah, it's going to be great. Cool. Um I think that's all we've got time for. So, uh we'll see you in the verse. Bye. Everyone, Brian Chambers from the Frankfurt office. Uh this week I have a little bit of a cold, so bear with me if I sound funny. Um digging in straight to the team. Um on the engine side, good progress on procedural planets. We see that all the time. Um but it will continue to keep working on it, but honestly we've made some really good progress um on there looking at a render node uh for the planet plus perspective render elements, uh shader separation for planet terrain um to simplify it so we can only use
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what we need when we need it. Um helps keeps things optimized. Um also just general bug fixes and optimization that'll be going on in a regular basis. Um we started on uh areas, tags, and zone system work. Um they help kind of quantify that and compartmentalize that a bit more. Uh shader compilation fixes. Uh we continued with some track view editor stuff for the cinematics guys. Um that's starting to wind down cuz we're getting it pretty much where we need. Um local physics grid work. specifically stuff on the star fair. There's some issues there that uh physics guys looking into. Um continuing on also physics with EVA. Found some issues there that we're
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sorting out and I think we've sorted those out. Um and we're also making progress on water and different water direction for planets, which is cool. I don't think you guys have seen much of that yet on water, but it's uh what we're showing internally right now is pretty cool. Um weapons, we finished off a new one that we're currently calling the scatter gun. We addressed feedback on existing rail gun. And we had a new member join the team. So that took some of the guys down to help get him on board. Weapons team now is up to four guys, which is great. AI continue working on subsumption. They had a lot of discussions on the subsumption editor. Really what do you need there to be able
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to give the designers and so on all the all the detail that's needed to create the proper behaviors considering all the careers and everything that we that we want. Enter zone, exit zone signals for that. Implemented those. Removed. Went up and did some general cleanup. We had some unused Lua and AI data and stuff that was in there. So took a another day or so a couple guys to to dig through and just make sure we pull out everything that's not needed anymore. In that process also you defining some of the scripting standards that we are using that way just everybody's on the same page and everything's unified. Um. Sure there's a few other things, but those were the high level. And on the
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cinematic side, cinematic team all last week and this week is at a mocap shoot up in Ealing Studios. All the reports we've gotten back so far that you know shoots been going pretty good, good data. It's been fun working with the talent and so on. So they're getting everything they need for Squadron. So we look forward to those guys coming back and seeing what they pulled off. So. Thanks again and appreciate all the support and talk to you next week. Ciao. So I hear we're building out the Drake Caterpillar. Where'd you hear that? I'm an important person. I hear things. Well, you're right. The team here is currently working on the Drake
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Yay! And in fact, tech designer Calix Renault sat down with our community manager Jared Huckaby to explore the new white boxing in the Caterpillar in a new episode of Ship Shape. Let's check it out. Just says do something man. Okay. Yours is better than mine. Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Ship Shape. I'm your host, community manager Jared Huckaby, and with me in this episode is designer extraordinaire. What Is it just designer extraordinaire? That's what I'm officially officially is now. Yeah. Technical designer extraordinaire, Mr.
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Calix Renault. Calix, how you doing, man? pretty good. Good. Now, we are doing our first Ship Shape revisiting. We're going back and taking another look at the Caterpillar white box phase. Now, we did a Ship Shape with a designer Randy Vasquez quite a while back when the Caterpillar had its first set of white boxing as is often in the case in game development. Things change, requirements all turn and stuff like that. And so, Calix has been tasked with re-white boxing the Caterpillar. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Uh yeah. So, the work that Randy did really laid out the groundwork for deciding a lot of the broad strokes design decisions about where the Caterpillar is going to fit in the the broader universe
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and where it's going to be like how how we're going to build out our art for it. Uh this white box is more about nailing down the specifics of both the the space that you're moving through, the functionality of that, uh how we how we feel about um just just how it feels to walk through this ship. Right. And I mean, that's that's the thing that I think was was the most exciting about it is walking through this ship and sort of feeling it out. Yeah, cuz I mean, no no amount of effort time and time spent can can can get you ready for that time when you have to actually get inside and then you actually have to walk through and go from from station to station stuff and then you start you start realizing, "Oh, okay, our scale was a little off here. We we didn't quite We need a little bit more in this area." kind of stuff like
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that. Yeah, so we've had the opportunity to go through and try some things. Uh we've changed some of the things because there's you run into these realities that uh you know, it's not it's not nice to move through this space or this thing is going to collide with that thing. Uh so, when you actually try it out, it it helps sort of illuminate these issues and so we've had the opportunity to go back and revisit it and I've also had the opportunity to try out some new things and sort of see where it's going to fit into our future developments. All right. So. So, we're in CryEngine now and the Caterpillar's looking great here. I mean, the the fidelity in this is is just It's No. It's This is This is what PC gaming allows, really, is the the opportunity to
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I don't know. I got There's engines back here. That's what those are supposed to be. All right, so And the Freelancer's for scale. Yes. And I see I see a bits of a Hornet down at the bottom. is here to explode. Okay. We will do that shortly. All right, so let's take a look through the internal white boxing of the Uh shall we go into game now or Sure. I'd like to to start off here in the habitation area. Uh switching to game. Feeling like a person. Walking around. You can come into We so far we're only dealing with the cargo module. So, uh all of these bits are in various stages of white box mock-up. And so we've built it out like here there's what it's look like when you've got a pretty good haul and this is what it looks like when you're empty.
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And this is how it is when you're completely full. And you know, we'll be walking through and And what size uh cargo units are these? Are these 1 SCU? Yeah, each each one of these is 1 SCU. I do not offhand remember the final number that the Caterpillar gets. It's I think with uh with all the uh elements that are carved out for this catwalk over here for each space individually, I think it comes out to something like Is it like Is it 90 or is it 120? Some It's We'll Not a final number. We're going to We're going to final number. We're going to deal with that. Um but the If if you if you load it up completely, you have a fair amount of of cargo at your disposal.
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So so this is an empty cargo module here. And notice there's a catwalk on one side. Yes. And you have the uh ability to come over here and open it up. Oh, nice. It's kind of cool. Now the original white box in the mini did have the Caterpillar the cargo the catwalk rather through the center. Yeah. Uh one of the reasons that we wanted to switch it up um we felt that you know, in in the context of eventually having firefights in this thing, it was nicer having split level here rather than having a thing over Uh you do lose a small amount of cargo to get this space. Uh but it just it feels a lot better um having the bulkhead here. it's
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it's I we we just feels better, really. I think it also plays into the asymmetry of the ship, though. Yeah, it it's just about everything I've seen of this ship, you know, screams that asymmetry. So, having the having the raised catwalk on one side, you know, goes along with that. I'm having some movement issues. Every once in a while I get stuck. That's fun. I put it here. Yeah. So, both sides do open. I have a little rail. But, I fell off anyway. All right. So, for these cargo modules and uh the standard caterpillar has four modules that can be swapped out. Right? So, you you So, you unload and load from each individual model module off to the side.
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Uh and you'll probably do be doing it from that side. Your tractor beam's over there, but you have the capacity to go through this way. Um here's what one short mock-up of the We're starting to to implement or think about terminals and some of the more ambient interactions with your ship of you know, I I walk through here and I want to know what's in this space and this thing should tell me and I should be able to interact with this and find out what those things are. Uh this would be repeated throughout each of the each of them, but I only put it into this one. And we have you know, double doors opening up between everything. And that's because the modules can be separated. There's no guarantee there's another thing on this side.
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And I'm getting stuck again. So, you've put uh components in every single one of these. And in this case we've placed them above where you're going to be able to deploy them out to bring them down for physical repair. You'll be able to reach into this. and swap out like do whatever Uh welding or what have you. Um if there's something to swap out, you'll be doing it there. Such a homer. I was You see me tilt my head like I'm trying to look under it. I have no 3D goggles on. And come up to the front and we have as a that leads up to a turret which is only mocked up here. Uh then we have door controls. Let's go down to the front. the other side of that the the clear Is that Is that a window?
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That was a That was a window. Sort of leading you to the front of the caterpillar nose here. There this space uh has various uses. Uh not all of which I think are cleared for discussion. but generally you we want a another terminal here to tell you the state of this room. Um there will be some cargo plates so that you can You could potentially use this for doing deals. You could potentially use this for egress. Uh all manner of things. Um but if you know, we had the the cargo in there. Yeah. And that was that was the front most space with the door that opened up.
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Yeah. So in in front here is where that freelancer was. Uh and so we can open up the doors. Uh that is not how these doors open. Uh we've had Well, I mean this this white box is an exploration, right? So uh we put things in here to be like, "How does this work? How does this look?" Uh this is not like we have taken this further now. This is actually uh uh has already received review. We've already have had notes on this. This isn't this isn't its final form. Um and so that's uh you know, among the things that'll will changing is the way that this opens, but uh, we have the atmosphere shield, uh, which is, uh, another thing that we're playing around with. You'll have, you know, turn that off, but nothing happened. Because,
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uh, you know, let the atmosphere rebuild. If I turn off the cargo locks first, then Oh, it still doesn't happen, cuz it's broken, because I'm faking it. But, uh, I I had it It was really cool, you guys. I had it pull sucking the, uh, the cargo out into space, and now it's someone else's problem. That's right. We'll see if we can't get some video of that and put it here as if it were happening live. And then I'll And then I won't admit that it failed. Um, so, you know, we have These sections will be will be, uh, sort of explored individually, uh, as we build out each of the the interactions that we want for the various modules that can go here. Um, the cargo one it was chosen because it's relatively simple. So, we've basically seen all it has to offer.
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And if you take a look in our April monthly report, you'll see some concept work for the, uh, habitat one of the habitat modules. not mistaken. And the also, I the habitation, this room. so, exploring things like, uh, having life support here, uh, I mean, open it out so you can access this for repair. having, uh, armory with, uh, this is where you're going to store your replacement balls. Uh, Most dangerous weapon in all of Star Citizen. That's right. Uh, and I got I got to have a lot of fun with, uh, the elevator here. Um, Drake Drake only uses the most
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sensible of, uh, deployment methods. Yeah, they're they're a very pragmatic organization. Why wouldn't you have a weird robot arm? Oh. Clipping. All right, cut this. Fast forward to this. Yeah. Never show this part again. And we head back to the engine room. engines. You can see them here. Clearly labeled as heavy engines. Well, you want to know where they are. Yeah, really. White boxing ain't sexy, guys. Uh you'll have all you know, your fuel generators, uh ammo, fuel. Um here's your engineering terminal. Uh you have to be surrounded by all the the muck.
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I've I've always been a fan of this uh haunted uh turret here. no floor. So, I also um this is where I started uh mocking up the actual interaction for the the terminals. Um so, one of the features is a is a better example of this. Let's go to the better example. Just run right past that. You'll see it. You'll see it. That was cool looking. So, uh I I took the one that was down there, brought it up here, and flushed it out a bit. Um so, one of the things that you'll notice is that we have this neat parallax effect where the cursor does not stay in the center of the screen. part of the reason for that is because if it did, if you
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just look at the center of the screen, and I move that over there, now I can't see half the terminal. Uh which makes makes it really sort of awkward, but when I don't have to do that, when I can access the entire screen this way, and we have uh we've we've figured out some some pretty cool stuff. You know, it's it's a really an ambient interaction. You walk come to it, and play around, you walk away, it's done. Uh but one of the things that is kind of cool is that uh the the system works in such a way that uh it always endeavors to keep the the cursor on the screen. And I've found I've gone ahead and found one of the the weak points because again, this isn't actually coded up. This is us
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doing a mock-up. Uh but you'll be able to view a terminal from any angle. Uh and it it sort of naturally draws even if you start off over here just through interaction, you'll end up looking at the majority of the terminal having on the screen uh if you're interacting with it. But there's nothing stopping you from looking away. You can always you you can have as much or as little interaction with these as you want. Um you'll be able to interact with it and, you know, bring up a uh model of the ship having the map, getting getting information there. Uh playing around with setting messages. you know, that that
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being able to set things to to to leave ambiently in your ship, um really make it yours. We have Now, what does this area that we're in right now Uh we're currently in the command module. Um which is the detaching escape pod type thing. Uh it's also the bridge of the ship. you can kind of see it. I don't have it you in it right now, but uh standing next to it, it's not given given the layout of the ship, it's actually not that bad of a view. Like you we don't have we we we're able to raise it up to uh have it uh prevent it from occluding the majority of your view. So, it's it's not not actually that bad. Uh you do have to be careful because you're not at
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the center of mass. So, when you're rotated, it'll be uh a different experience, but it's it the view is should be just fine. Uh it comes with the the turrets and uh you'll be able to have uh co-pilots and uh tactics officers, sensors, all that stuff. I can't help but notice there's a ladder down in the command module here. Is the command module two floors now? Command module is two floors. Uh with its little habitat area, another life support, uh the showers, you have foot lockers, you have uh storage space, you'll have the uh the command module's own engineering uh room with its own
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uh engineering station. Uh because this thing can just leave, so you're going to have to repair it someday. Uh and come over and repair the engines. I'm going to start a uh Drake Caterpillar command module racing league. Uh I'm not here to stop you. Now, I'm trying out various things like it's a little hard to see. Let's see if I might Nope. There we go. that's that's me. I'm the gold ball. see if I can So, that's that's one of the one of the cool things is that uh you'll be able to uh register people and have them like
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actually see people moving around your ship and and And it also looks like we have control of the bulkheads, too. Uh so Yeah. I you can go over and you can manipulate it from the terminal. Uh you'll be able to uh open and close the doors. which is all the way over there. But It's definitely happening. We're too We're too slow for it, though. That's right. Yeah. You have to You have to explain to us what the the the the squiggly ball thing was that we're in here. deal? Cuz that's all people are are going to be wondering about. Okay. So uh this is your tractor beam.
00:35:16
Uh and this is a mock-up of Oh, hey. lost some cargo. It It did work. I told you it worked. I never doubted you. That's the That's the cargo I threw out earlier. It's It's stuck in a little gravity well. A gravity well like that would might be how you manipulate the tractor beam. It might not. We're still uh I don't know. You might pushing and pulling and and doing things like that. But this is the control reticle uh that I would be pushing around and um I forget what keys I used to move that around. basically set up a a little thing to tell you exactly where it is in space
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and see it relative to your ship. Uh I did not, however, make it so you could turn that off. So when you leave it, it's still there. It's the It's This is a good chance to remind folks that this was for an internal, you know, proof of concept and what not. It is not designed to be shown externally. This is one of those things that we do that most other companies wouldn't, but uh uh We know you guys like to see things in their earliest state and their roughest state, so we take the opportunities when we can to show you warts and all. We have the uh avionics room, the server room, uh power plant room. I have uh the the jump drive and coolers some more of the engines here and
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you know, so double-decker uh engineering bay. pretty nice stuff. Is there anything else that was rad? Probably. I love Drake, though. I'm a I'm a pragmatic guy, so I like the the the the pragmatic. I also I'm also a big fan of the used future, you know? I'm much more a Blade Runner guy than a Minority Report guy. So, so Drake the Drake aesthetic in general really speaks to me. Yeah, and I I like you know, having having made the space walkable and interactive, I like the the degree to which I feel like I can just reach out and touch the ship and how it feels, even with nothing in it, to me this feels lived in. This feels like a uh real meaningful space.
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So, I like uh and the the ladder here just leads back down to engineering. Cool. Well, the haunted turret. I think that's pretty much it for this uh Calix. Thanks for taking the time to Oh, my pleasure. us some work. Uh of course, the Caterpillar has already iterated past this. Like I said, the the front doors have changed, whatnot, and uh we've begun not only concepting uh the different modules and inner workings, uh we've even begun building some of the models. I have seen Elwyn uh has already built out most of one of the habitat modules. So, so Drake Caterpillar is in progress. it's on its way. Uh we hope you enjoy, you know, these early looks like this. And uh yeah, that's been Ship Shape for for Ship Shape Drake Caterpillar 2. Thank you.
00:38:31
I'm Jared. Let's get this. Nice. Finger guns. Misc Freelancer Built for life. Now, over the last few years, Origin has
00:39:24
become more known for looking fast than any sort of actual speed. Take the 300i. A ship that brags about its extra comfy beds isn't exactly what you want when you're looking for a racer. However, all is not lost. Origin has just written us an apology letter. Meet the new M50. Space. The best ships gracefully dance across its expanse. The worst clumsily plod across its face. The new M50 doesn't have time for any of that. Instead, it simply slices its way through. The 2944 M50 was designed with one goal
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in mind: make the ship that will win the next Murray Cup. The surprising thing is Origin may have just about done it. The stats are an orgy of mind-bending numbers, but it comes down to two things. Less weight and more power. You'll notice that the nose cone has grown what I can only describe as a mustache added to stabilize all the additional thrust that the re-tooled and updated twin hammer HM 4.3 drives spew out. And the refinement doesn't stop there. They've narrowed the front fuselage, moved the wings forward for better balance, shaved the cockpit view paint down to the thinnest it could still be and not shatter in your face. The result, a pure flying machine. Each movement on the stick translates
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directly into unadulterated throttle action. Welcome back to the glory days of flying. That's all well and good, but when you're talking about a racing machine, at the end of the day, you really have to well, race it. And who better to prove the M50's metal than the last Origin ship to actually manage a cup win, the 350R. Piloting the 350R is Galactic Gears very own two-time cup holder, Teemo Backsheet. Flying the M50, an incredible man who for some inconceivable reason has never won a single Murray Cup. Me. This, my friends, is going to be good. I keep trying to push the limits, but I
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can't FIND THE LIMITS! ORIGIN, CAN YOU HEAR ME? APOLOGY ACCEPTED! APOLOGY ACCEPTED. HI EVERYONE. WELCOME TO ANOTHER SEGMENT
00:42:49
of Lore Makers Guide to the Galaxy. If you are unfamiliar with this, um this is a look at the Star Citizen universe. A member of the lore team goes through a system. We discuss science and story ideas, and we talk about the direction we want systems to go so that they will one day be available for you, the player, in exquisite space detail. So, today we have Earth right here. There it is. Very shiny. Uh we're going to do Tamsa. So, let's go. Tamsa is the only known system that has a black hole at the center.
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Um now, a black hole is a region of space-time that exhibits strong gravitational effects, and nothing can escape from inside it, which includes light, electromagnetic radiation, particles, Big Benny's machines, potatoes, photons, that kind of thing. So, we got a little corona of captured light here that turbulent created, which I think looks pretty cool, honestly. So, Tamsa was discovered in 2943 by Banu explorer Kofi Betelma. And they named the system after a math artist called Tamsawheel. Like that's her her art name that she picked for herself. Uh her art has been described as mathematical poetry. It is also been described as a beautiful precision of
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a beautiful nexus of precision and chaos. That's what That's what the critic said. Just Yeah. And uh I think that's pretty appropriate for a system with a black hole in the center. All right. Now, back to black holes. I used to think that black holes were kind of scary. I thought they were cosmic vacuums that would one day suck up the entire universe and we would all die crushed in really strong gravity and we would But that's that's just not what That's not what black holes are and that's not how they work. Uh you can sort of think of them as superdense zombie stars. They are no longer stars. They're the remnants of a dead star. At least the stellar black holes are. And they have very very very strong gravity, but they're not going to suck up the whole universe.
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They have stable points at which celestial bodies can exist and can orbit in a you know, regular manner just like planets orbit our sun. Unless you go past the event horizon here, uh which is basically the point beyond which you can't escape the black hole and you are doomed to get sucked in and just stay there and possibly view the birth and death of the universe through time dilation. That's pretty cool. I wouldn't do it, though. So, oh, back So, black holes are that are formed, in case you don't know, they're formed through the gravitational collapse of massive stars like this one was once a type O star, which is a blue giant star.
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once the mass of the star collapses after it burns through its fuel and the star's temperature isn't high enough to prevent it from imploding under its own weight, um the mass basically condenses into this tiny tiny tiny tiny thing that we've never seen really, but we know exists and creates these gravitational time-space anomalies, which are super black holes are way more than I can describe at this time. Uh there's a book I've been thinking about reading called Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Kip Thorne. Looks cool. I think that that would be that would satisfy my black hole knowledge-seeking desires. as I said, this is a planetary system. Tiamat 1 is way out here. It is a chthonian planet. I don't think
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we've discussed chthonian planets yet. They are essentially the remains of the cores of gas giants. The atmosphere of the gas giant was stripped away through hydrodynamic escape and it left just this this superdense core that's probably rich in metals and minerals and would be, you know, oh man, so cool. I wonder what we could mine there. However, Tiamat is still off-limits because it's being assessed by the Fair Chance Act. It was It was discovered pretty recently, you know, 2943. So, you know, once the Fair Chance Act concludes that maybe life isn't developing in a black hole system, maybe mining rights could be explored, which I think would be pretty cool. And now, it's not the only planet in the
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system. There is one more if we zoom way out. Tiamat 2. Over here. It's a gas giant. Um it's about the size of Jupiter as a you well, you can't see because it's not to scale. But, what I mean is about the mass of Jupiter. It has a thick atmosphere and a dense core. And like its planetary sibling over here, Tamsa 1, it was a rogue planet. These are both rogue planets that were captured by the gravity of the black hole. Now, Tamsa 1 was probably ejected from its system in a nova-like event, which probably contributed to it losing all of its atmosphere. Tamsa 2, however, was ejected from its system through means unknown because it still retains its atmosphere. Um we don't know yet. Scientists in the
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the verse are still trying to figure out exactly why it still has its atmosphere, where it came from, and only time will tell figuring out what became of this planet system. Now, since uh Tamsa is so small, even though it's super super interesting, I think that we do have time today to do one more system, which is another really interesting uh system. It's called Min. This one is a rogue planet, much like the rogue planets that were captured by Tamsa. It was ejected from its system through means unknown, and it's just kind of tearing its way through space with four moons that it's picked up
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in its journey. It was discovered discovered at 2473 in an unlikely nexus of jump points, which Let's see how many jump points there are in there in this system. We have one, two. We have two jump points, which is just wild because it's Yeah, it's a planet. Like most jump points that we know of converge around stars. No one knows why this planet has picked up jump points. It's a cool science mystery of the Star Citizen universe. So, it's Jupiter-mass, same as Tamsa 2. Uh it generates its own heat, much like our planet, our gas giant Jupiter does, through the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism, which means as the surface of the planet cools, the pressure on the planet drops and the
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surface shrinks, which in turn heats the core of the planet. So, like somewhere in the 600 K range. Science. Science. Uh its first moon right here, Minmus A, is an uninhabited rocky moon that has been strip mined long time ago. There aren't any resources available. no one is sure whether it formed with the accretion disk that created Minmus or whether it was just picked up in Minmus' journey through space. Could be an interesting question to answer. Minmus B is one of the most interesting moons in space in my opinion. It against all odds is somewhat inhabitable because it has an incredible
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amount of geothermal energy that makes liquid water available on its surface. Now, it is still really cold and it's not ideal for human habitation, but a couple of settlements have, in fact, been built up here. Uh what's putting those settlements into jeopardy is the recent discovery of bioluminescent bacteria on the bottom of the ocean that clusters around the hydrothermal vents that help heat the planet. And so, there is currently a debate going on about whether or not to apply the Fair Chance Act to this system. Uh cynics say that the reason that it hasn't been done yet is that there really aren't any valuable resources here since the whole system was strip mined ages and ages ago. people are like, "Oh, well, the government's not going to
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want to invest money in assessing this system because why would they? What money do they stand to make? might might be bad for the bacteria on Men B. However, there are still some scientists there researching it. Uh so, they'll they'll find out more about it in time, one hopes. Men 1C is very much like Men 1A. It is the smallest of Men's moons. Uninhabited, rocky, totally stripped mine. Very small. And where are you, Men Men 1D? I know I saw you somewhere. There you are. This guy is another tiny baby moon. Uh it's not as small as a lot of the others. It's uh
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smaller than 1B, but it's bigger than 1C. It's pretty You know, it's all right pace place. It's covered with impact craters. So, if anybody wanted to know much about the history of the system, they could probably do some digging into the impact craters and figure some stuff out geologically. Which I think would be awesome. So, there we go. That's Men. Unlikely nexus of two jump points, rogue planet with moons tearing through out the system. Just being interesting in space with its cool, inhabitable, barely inhabitable moon. So, that is it for this week's Lore Master's Guide to the Galaxy. Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this incredibly sciency tour of
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two of the most interesting small systems in the verse. Goodbye. Hey there, Tyler Witkin, community manager in the Austin Texas studio, here to bring you this week's MVP. But before we do that, I got to say, you guys keep making it harder and harder on me to choose just one MVP a week. And I wanted to take this time to clear something up. MVP is not an award just for content submitted in the last week. There's no time frame for it. So, if you submitted content this week and you didn't get MVP, you're not out of the running just quite yet. But, for this week, a big congratulations to Ackno Reborn for his video teaser titled Ghost Strike. The combination of voice acting, editing, and music is enough to give you chills
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and leave you craving for more. So, big congratulations to you, Ackno. Keep them coming. You're this week's MVP. Back to you guys. Cool. I look forward to seeing the full production when it's ready. Yeah, it's it's amazing these people can get together and make these, you know, professional quality movies just cuz they love something so much. It's it's it's always inspirational. And finally, each week we take a look at something still in development for Star Citizen's future. It's time for ATV's Fast Forward. Ah!
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Be sure to tune in to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Twitch. We'll be answering your questions about that fast forward and all other aspects of Star Citizen development. And I'll be there, so it will be better. And you have to ask if they like us, cuz if you do like us, you can hit subscribe below to all of our social channels. Yay. Yay. And with that, thank you to all of our subscribers, as always, to making this show possible. We'll see you next week on Around the Verse. You know what? We should also mention you're taking a little trip. I am taking a little trip. I am going to the UK to do some exciting secret squirrel things. So, Sandy won't be here to host next week and we will miss her a great deal. in fact, I think we're also going to miss your birthday. I know. I'm actually going to take my first holiday.
00:57:43
So, um I'm going to take a couple of days where you guys are going to run the show. and it's not going to go well. They're going to go. Yeah. But happy birthday. Thank you. Early happy birthday. Early happy birthday. We'll see you next week on Around the Did you know that many of Star Citizen's
00:58:30
developers are on social media? If you would like to follow Star Citizen on Facebook, you can find us here. Or on Twitter, here. And even Instagram, here. And for a full list of developers' personal accounts they're willing to share with the community, check out this link. You can find out what I bought at Amazon this week. Star Wars stuff. It was yeah, it was probably Star Wars stuff.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.