CitizenCon2951: Ship Talk

9 October 202101:17:582,260 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:08
oh that's pretty cool huh yeah yeah it's awesome so we we made the 404 yeah it was a ruse all along it was a real ship look cool though i like it those trainers are always super cool to see the the artwork from both yeah they did a really good job of kind of showing off what what i think everyone's kind of done yeah right so we should probably go on with the show uh this is ship talk uh where we are going to talk about a variety of things today uh my name is john crew i'm the vehicle director here at cig i'm ben curtis and i'm the vehicle director at crg and i'm paul jones art director so the the 400i
00:00:58
it's a constellation competitor and we've got a few of these ships in this category across the board we have the constellation we have the corsair and now we have the 400i and the 400i has a few interesting features that makes it a compelling choice over the others so being an origin ship it's obviously very visually sleek and fast but also it can carry cargo and a vehicle at the same time size-wise there's obviously a big gap in the range we have the 100 series at the start it jumps up to the 300 series then there's a big jump to the 600 series and then another jump to the 890 so finding a space for this was fairly easy size wise i think it fills the gap quite nicely so in terms of the process um normally what happens is we you know we we assign it to one concept artists and
00:01:47
we start the ball rolling so it's really just a game of sort of exploration at this point you know it's fast and loose you know we always have a timeline uh for each concept and so it's you know the pressure is always on basically it doesn't matter how many shapes we've done there's always that pressure to get it done and hit and hit the sort of key points and so at this point of exploration it's really sort of uh loosely goosey in terms of figuring out ideas looking at shapes looking at silhouettes and sort of not locking yourself into a line of thinking it's basically you know we'll look at different shapes so some will be more influenced by the 600i some more by the 100i and then we'll sort of do a mix and match and so like i said sometimes you don't quite
00:02:36
hit it on that on that sort of you know i think like right at the beginning yeah when you've got like a well-established manufacturer it's really beneficial because you kind of you have that to pull from but you also don't want to get into the point where it's just a scale down 600 or a scaled up do you know what i mean you kind of like you don't want them all just to look like the same ship just slightly different variants yeah so i think 400 is um it certainly stands out within the lineup but it's clearly an origin ship and i think it's i mean because we we sort of follow the man you know sort of car manufacturers don't in terms of uh the brand it's sort of expanding the brand sort of the brand also develops over time so we have like a double yeah you know since the start of the project origin has sort of slightly changed its style a little bit
00:03:24
um and then like say yeah you don't want to you don't want just a mini 600 yeah even though there's a part of me that would just be like right let's do a minute do you realize that yeah yeah and even that even at this point i kept sort of coming back to one original sketch that had been done for the or what was it i think it was 100 there was a little thumbnail um you know it's literally in my head it's about that big and the sketch is just teeny weeny i was like i kind of want a version like this this looks kind of cool and and so basically in the end i just went in and and keep bashed some ideas together so this was before my time on the ship team so it's quite interesting to learn a bit more about the process yeah
00:04:10
it's a great shift my favorite one a lot of the little concept thumbnails get if you see one because we often show them in jump point magazines afterwards after a ship's being released you see all the early sketches and people probably noticed like that hundred eye thumbnail that we did that was rejected for the 100 but then has come around for this and you never know what might happen with ones that we didn't choose for this one yes yes they might appear in future ships so ultimately this is this is what uh you know this is like a visual that i did so it's you know it's throwing together a bunch of shapes uh what we call kit bashing from different models because it's quick as an art director you've always got
00:04:58
it feels like you've got zero time to get yeah to get a result so it's how do you get a provider visual that people can understand in the shortest time possible and so my understanding of the ship was it was a luxury luxury explorer and so you can see here that that's why there's a swimming pool in there and a deck you know the park processes that we show to chris roberts to get sort of direction and feedback and chris was quite adamant that this this was going to be you know an explorer it wasn't it wasn't just there a small-scale partnership it was you know it needed to have a function it needed to be a competitor to that scale and kind of role of ship yeah you know we did quite a lot of interior investigations and
00:05:46
um you know just sort of looking at looking at ways of arranging space within that ship because like we said earlier even though the ship looks big it's actually really tight like it's like yeah it's a lot harder than you think to achieve everything that no star citizens expect to have in their ships and all the components and all the functionality a very streamlined sort of two decks or really like one deck that stretches most of the lower section and the the upper bit which had the pool in it yeah maybe one day you'll get maybe get before you pull one day so in terms of this process what happens is we finish the concept or what we what we think is finished and then get chris stein off do a couple of paint schemes and then it passes over to
00:06:34
your department yeah so so from the concept um normally you know the we'll kind of take it as quickly as possible into the editor and that just allows us to um kind of really get a good sense of the space from from the player and making sure that um you know everything that we think we need is actually going to fit um making sure the components go through and like like we were saying earlier a lot of the time is what our ship starts off with its kind of um paper design you know it's official design document to the point where we're actually kind of uh working on the ship the requirements can change that might you know that's not just because okay we'll have this and add that to it it's sometimes you know a balance pass has been done in the game we've realized that you know a certain ship item you know a certain size shield might not be suitable for it anymore or um it might
00:07:23
be just the yeah we think or actually it'd be great if we could fit the x1 in it because it's kind of the perfect ship for it um but that wasn't like say on the the original plans so yeah i mean like like you were saying the the ship is kind of a hard split with its two floors so we've kept sort of all of engineering and cargo and storage and everything downstairs still and then the kind of the habs and the the crew space is all upstairs with the bridge obviously once we kind of get that white box in game we then start just making sure that um we can fit everything we need we also that's the point that we kind of really start internally showing that ship to everyone that that is invested in it and including chris and um you know everyone that needs to kind of have a say and one of the kind of things
00:08:10
that chris was really keen for although he didn't want this ship to be a kind of luxury party ship he did want it to feel origin i think originally we had like the lift yeah there was a smaller trying not to do hand movements too much yes there was just a single small platform just for the crew that went straight up into yeah i mean that whole area was quite tricky wasn't it because it was the um docking ring the docking collar yeah the lift yeah and then there was a an entrance to the front and an entrance you had yeah originally i think on the concept you walked in through the docking collar um and like say the floor was a lift you had the collar on the side and then doors the other side which took you to like a little handy chamber that had the suit lockers in i think it was at the front yeah and
00:08:58
yeah the the first bit figure out from chris was the entrance doesn't really feel very grand for an origin ship and that's when we kind of introduced the the stairs and the kind of like the big not marble staircase but that that sort of idea that you were kind of like you know walking into the ship felt a little bit more grand that had some knock-ons to the kind of interior space as well because yeah obviously making a one person or two person lift is something that that's relatively small is it fits in a nice tight space um but when you've got a set of stairs that need to fit or need to have a decent height change um that requires a lot more space so what we ended up doing was kind of opening up this first chamber you walk into and rather than being divided into separate rooms that kind of whole space kind of acts as the airlock and that's got everything that you need when you first enter the ship
00:09:47
and i think it does like i say just that initial entrance feels quite nice now yeah yeah we don't have a lot of ships like that anymore but have the go up the front of it and yeah yeah i mean we've obviously we've got another one that we'll show after this but yeah most of them if they've got a ramp it's it's like cargo isn't it it's pure function and and not really no i think you guys have done a great job on this because it was it was tricky you know i remember it at the time and you feel the time pressure i know it was when i was just starting on the team as well so i was like coming in and be like what do we do like where do we go and also i mean it's also nice because it sort of dovetails with that original sketch which has there's an element there i think at the time i sort of bend it off
00:10:34
because it was just like i don't like i'm sure i had some thoughts about it i mean everybody knows i've got a sort of 64 kilobit memory so stuff kind of like gets lost after a short amount of time but um i think we did discuss it but then yeah i was just like no let's just let's just go let's go simple but yeah you guys did good stuff yeah and then the next thing to tackle like paul was saying was um the kind of like the addition of the bike garage um it it was a bit of a headache trying to kind of fit that in and the original plan that you know you can see is originally we were going to have it um at the back of the ship next to the cargo or within the back of the cargo yeah within the cargo room um it it did fit um but it kind of brought up a few quirks with it i think um the yeah there was a few different quirks from
00:11:22
different departments so um from a design point of view i think we could only make it fit if you sent the bike up on its own which was fine but because the main entrance to the ship was at the front it meant that yeah you'd get off you had to drive your bike onto this platform get off your bike send the bike up run around to the front of the ship run up the stairs yeah and this there just look at your bike opening isn't exactly like a super quick thing so yeah it just felt kind of like in terms of flow yeah all right i need to quickly quickly get off planet and you're like i don't know right okay yeah oh run yeah okay a minute later or two minutes later you're in you're in the seat ready to fly like i said that was one of the issues we kind of hear and then the other i guess um issue was it just it started eating into the cargo space so it meant that you couldn't once you had the cargo fully
00:12:09
loaded there was very little space for you to kind of traverse around the cargo hold basically you know we had a number of kind of ideas we played with and then uh if you click on yeah we ended up um basically putting at the opposite end of the ship now the nose should we call it the nose yeah the nose now opens up and it's got like a nice little kind of dedicated x1 garage in there it's a nice use of that kind of spine that was there originally there was nothing really the gravity drive was there yeah but we kind of nudged that back a bit um and i guess the mounts for the guns but they they kind of still tucked out to the side a little bit so yeah there's a better use of space because it was so yeah like say it had the gravity generator there and it had the suit lockers but it was weird that you had to go through
00:12:56
the air lock to get your suit and yeah back out so yeah taking up that space was was much nicer um and the other really good thing is all the controls for getting a new ship and doing this they're all all right right next to you so you go yeah open this open this yeah and put your bike away yeah and go up and i think that was one of the kind of like um the i say the nice things of it is you can i guess ride up to your ship and it's just there you send it up straight up and and yeah there's no messing around um so yeah that was one of the other challenges and then to be honest most of the the rest of the ship kind of went pretty much to to plan in terms of you know what was on concept i don't think there was any kind of real surprises so you know now as you enter the ship and you come into the kind of like the main body you're into engineering this ship does have large shields yes yeah so that was
00:13:46
that was another thing to make it different um obviously we've made changes whilst during development to other ships and shields have changed so it's not quite as unique as it was um but it's still very well shielded for its size and the other cool thing about engineering is those rooms at the edge are cool cool yeah they're climate controlled so it's another nice little thing to play with gives all the teams a little bit of party mode in there yeah but yeah um i think that's it that was one of the things i think you established early on the concept was was this kind of like cool chamber in engineering yeah because we needed that space i mean you
00:14:34
need space to put all the components somewhere and just thought let's just turn it into a feature yeah so and it kind of fits with the origin kind of family as well i think um yeah that's good that's good um and then yeah kind of from engineering you kind of go straight to the back and that's where you've got your your storage i don't know if you know the sdu size off of hand but um yeah not stopping now so you should probably put that in the notes sorry um yeah um so you can fit a decent amount of storage in there you've also got the escape pods one of the other things we were doing when we were looking at the space with the bike is originally we were kind of if we put the bike in this area it meant that the storage produced so we were looking at kind of other ways of moving the storage around at one point we thought we could put down the wings but then that didn't really make sense because you know i did it in wings where you saw your fuel and that sort of stuff and it just felt really awkward where this kind of
00:15:21
gives us the kind of classic traditional big block of cargo yeah big blockers yes yeah um you can put a cyclone in there yes other smallish vehicles yeah obviously it will take away your car gets better it's not you can do it but yeah yeah okay and then yeah we kind of make our way upstairs three-man three-crew bridge and yeah it's it's you know it's very to me anyway the bridge is very origin it feels um you know very very sleek um you get a nice view of the the kind of front of the ship out in front of you um and uh yeah it's it's a nice place and it's got the classic kind of origin uh kind of hardened and remember any low tech screens it's all kind of projected and
00:16:10
yeah it feels fancy yeah yeah does that mean you can see there's a lot of 600i influence like from the original concept image that was done for the 600i yeah so i was keen to get those that sort of it's almost like a like the black louvres yeah and then again everything sort of they were one of the things that we we kind of kept referencing back during the production was like let's just go back and have a look at this 600 because that's one of the again one of those kind of shapes that really sells origin to me and yes i think it was good kind of keeping them and that yeah it was also uh what's the origin buggy called g12 thank you yeah so again we've got the louvres yeah yeah the 890 as well as like all the the bigger origin ships have this sort of
00:16:58
arrangement of a single center seat and two crew ones whether they're at the front or at the back they're all sort of that style so it all plays together and then habs wise you kind of got the captain suite and you've got the the crew suite and you know within those they've got their own kind of lockers they've got their own kind of personal ship storage i'm not sure if it's exact but they're very similar in their kind of scale but obviously the captain gets the slightly more space a little bit more kind of luxury because you know he's the boss at one point it was a four person ship and then we reduced it down to three so we've got that extra space for them see i'm learning loads of stuff i didn't have today lots of things changed during the concept like changing it from four to three might sound like a quick thing on paper but then it's like you're losing a seat at
00:17:46
the bridge somewhere uh yeah there's been lockers you have to sit an extra seat in that bridge though because it would have you would have had to have kind of had them in two banks it would have been a bit yeah yeah just just purely visual sort of it feels a little bit nicer weighted if it's i mean the whole shape has a so it's a triangle it looks fast yeah yeah it looks fast yeah and then yeah as you kind of progress through to the rear of the ship um this is where let's say originally it was it was a party time yeah it was the party room yeah we've kept some of the elements i guess you know that there's still a kitchen a decent sized stitches it's still a nice space isn't it you know what i mean it's like a luxury it's not that sort of luxury yacht you've got your wine fridge so yeah yeah you've got everything everything you need back there you've got your food making facilities you've got your breakout area and then your big hollow table at the back yeah and that
00:18:35
was sort of like the um i guess like the operations area and we kind of we tried to make that space feel like um it was a little bit more focused with the holo table than the sort of you know the breakfast bar that's just in front of it and um i think having because we tried quite a few different ideas there as well actually i remember at one point we had like a war table with with seating and stuff but that was a bit tight for kind of maneuverability and also i think um it we ended up going with like a standing kind of hollow table rather than a seating one because when you first kind of like look at it it felt like an extension of the um relaxation area rather than like a kind of planning you know what we're gonna do in our operation type area and then yeah basically that kind of covers most of the 400 i guess as a
00:19:22
whole so we'll move from the foreign to something a bit bigger and something entirely new which is the anvil liberator which is anvil's latest design spaceship which is purely for transporting ships so we're going to do something properly and sort of provide that entry-level spaceship for that career if you want to be a ship hauler then this is the ship for you it provides that good foundational base for it it's a fairly regular sort of process on this one as jared and i have chatted before you know these ships are often described as as births you know easy births hard
00:20:11
births difficult births um i think this one was a fast birth it's been a while since we've worked on some anvil stuff so in terms of the lineup you know we have the ballista the terrapin the hurricane valkyrie you know it's probably more sort of you know it's one of those larger ships then we've got the carrick yeah so a lot of work has already been done for those we've got you know we've got modular kits so in terms of the concept process uh theoretically it's it's smoother sailing and in terms of you know our process again uh you know it's that it's that investigation and you know each manufacturer has a a loose set of rules i'll say it's loose because there's always space for us to slightly veer and slightly tweak the
00:20:59
manufacturer i think like saying earlier like manufacturers change with time as well as they evolve yeah it's not like every ship came out of the exact same day with the exact same manufacturing processes it kind of all yeah and i think i i mean that's kind of what i like about star citizen we've got this sort of it's a sort of rolling kind of like design you know it's sort everything is being updated yeah um and it you know it's nice that you know with if when we were narrative and they're like oh actually it's based on this old design yeah or whether it is it's a new stuff so you know one of the early requirements from john which you can see here in this uh fabulous designer art top quality design yeah i'm liking it i'm not sure about that uh shade of green not quite handle but basically this is
00:21:48
super easy for us and also you know because we're working with a contractor about sort of laying out the limits of you know because we always you know we like to make ships big you know um so it's always okay we've got our metrics it has to fit within this like whatever you do make it cool but it has to fit within these bounds yeah it was quite strict on the landing pad size but you need to fit a number of ships in it but also make sure that it really kind of stayed within its otherwise john will give us yeah big slap wrists yeah um because on on that image there you can see there's the red box which is the maximum bounds that the ship can be if if you go outside that it literally won't fit through the hangar doors and ceiling so obviously has to be in there that's a max not a goal to hit because we've ended up in the past with ships that
00:22:37
have a centimeter or two's clearance right at the edge when you're coming in and out of the hanger you just clip yeah as soon as you clip one side of it then it throws it into the other one yeah it makes it difficult and you can see there for the the extra small landing pads the green size so once you've got three of them so at this point in the the design brief it was just three extra small ships by the time you've got these three green and they're actually they have some z height to them which i didn't put in here by the time you've got these green blocks like you've got to have space for these and also got to fit in this then you sort of start funneling yourself into yeah i think i mean you'd you know you provided a reference image right at the start which is of the military hovercraft yeah the
00:23:25
american current if it's the navy or the army yeah and so that was like i mean people will see straight away the the correlation between the two and the sort of influence but it you know it also makes sense right it's a very functionality it's a very functional ship isn't it so and it feels like like say obviously the real life version has been made for that function and this this kind of follows suit yeah definitely and so you know we'll basically be looking at some of our exterior options and again it's always you know it's quite difficult when you have something like that that reference image of the military hovercraft because instantly it sits in your mind and you sort of get um kind of get sort of stuck in that
00:24:13
thinking and so you know part of my job is also to sort of push push the concept artists and say right okay well what about this what about that i think you it's always you know it's it's always a sort of dual role you know we sort of you know you work together and kind of two minds is always better than one right so in in this case we're sort of looking at you know this is a sort of first first stab at it so there's a lot of similarity with the valkyrie so there's the valkyrie engines you know it's it's pretty standard it's just on one floor plate and it's symmetrical then we look at some cleaner stuff it's not you know it's a nice design but uh it doesn't really speak of um
00:24:59
anvil to me i mean but i you know it's cool i like it there's something it's just some interesting certainly very hovercrafty yeah yeah i think just just uh two too simple for two wedgie this one was asymmetrical version you know got that massive tank on the side what it does i'm not quite sure at this point but it's you know it's just visual exploration we've got the asymmetrical wings again and you know sort of interested stuff at this point we're starting to push um into like terrapin territory so we've got sort of uh essentially like the bridge and it's kind of like got a cowl it's like sort of you know it's kind of like the little turtle head from the terrapin and sort of mixing and matching and so you know it's kind of interesting again
00:25:48
you know we're doing these things rapidly so you know has has some pros and cons design design wise as well because obviously we have the xy metric but you also have the z so a lot of uh hanging metrics are quite tall um so the the problem with this one was it was just to the height of the ship like the actual actual height it would have needed to be would mean double that so then you end up with this really tall gangly thing because we've also shortened it by a third so like you're trying to get yourself into like the shape of a ship yeah and then here is like um where we sort of start hitting upon something that um i don't know where the decision was made but you know it made sense to have the garages yeah and that lower deck here you know you've got two tanks lying side by side which
00:26:35
it you know it's cool it looks good but it isn't actually like an official feature it was around this point where we were looking at the the double layer thing uh and trying to get these two layers to work or two floors to work with the three larger ships so we changed it from the three extra small pads to two extra small pads which basically take any single seat fighter in the game and somewhere else so i think a prospector also fits on there yeah and then we scaled the the front one down to an extra extra small so that's things like the the argo mpuv origin 85x and smaller flying ships like that but also interestingly that extra extra small metric is sort of the same as the medium vehicle metric there's like a meter
00:27:22
difference in height which is the ballista and nova so we went from these three extra smalls to two extra smalls on top one extra extra small at the front and then these two garage slots which can also if you're willing to try and fly your small ship in there yeah you were playing around you could fit quite a few combinations yeah yeah i had a shot i treated it like i was a fan and basically just and basically filled that whole carriage there's no sort of like door open in space at all it was yeah yeah it was uh cyclones and we know what really is yeah i mean it looked good i mean it looked like um you know look like a ferry you know when they're just full of the vehicles all just stacked up um just increases like the risk value of flying it doesn't it like if you've got three ships on it all right yeah got 15 and you need a big insurance
00:28:10
payout you know once we have the you know an exterior that we were happy with and it's you know then we move on to the interior and you know it's only two crew yep so it's it's two crew uh you have obviously the person flying the thing and then the the second person who can either sort of a flexible role there there is a turret that they can control they can go sit in it and shoot anything that comes at you but it's not really a ship that's a combat ship it's it's a transporter ship if you want protection you need to bring protection with you or rely on the ships that you're carrying to provide that protection which is another benefit of this open-topped ship is yeah you can just you come underneath an attack and everyone can launch up straight you're not having to flow your ships out one by
00:28:58
one out of a tube they're they can get off pretty quickly and then launch jeeps yeah heavily one day one day one day we do a lot of tubes maybe yeah i don't think about that um yeah basically we've moved on to interiors again it's uh it's just investigation of um you know we've got our function and one needs to achieve but you know in the last two four years definitely the last two years is like our process has just been a lot a lot stronger in terms of player flow so there's no more of the staff error i mean that was our first multi-crew ship so the pipeline wasn't in place
00:29:46
i i mean spaceships interiors was like i don't know so i mean there's been a lot of learning going on so now it's like okay if i'm a player what what what experience do i want yeah like how do i get from a to b i don't want to do a to g to h to get to b yeah none of that business so so as we look at these um interiors we just sort of looked at sort of different flow basically different ideas so um it feels quite good and we sort of worked on again just flow so if you're in the garage you can easily get from the garage into what into the living quarters um you know the elevators just run the full height there's one for crew one for passengers so if you're under the ship you can just easily get up and down and
00:30:37
the whole process is a lot more streamlined um and there's even like even if you're in that top in those top rooms you know and like it's you know there's a call to action you've all got to get out we've even put a nice little set of stairs that just run down the side of the ramp and so you can just park you know run down get in here whatever it is whatever vehicle and then off you go so a lot of i feel like a lot of thought was given to just improve i think it's really nice as well the fact that you've got like say that that passenger section kind of sectioned off and they're always ready but then like say you said about the bowels of the ship and how that's that's all that technical stuff like hidden at the bottom and that that feels nice that that's crew only and you know because you don't want passengers yeah yeah
00:31:26
yeah just definitely running around and then moving on to you see here the garage space where the cargo is stored so originally that would cargo was going to essentially take up one of the gateways it was going to be a compromised choice that players could make of that the cargo is stacked down either down the middle of the the lower garage or across like one of the pads so you could choose uh but then decided to uh well we had a bit of space well basically a concept guy when i went rogue i was like what about this this is cool yeah yeah it's definitely cool yeah yeah like john can we have this coming to a meeting oh i've just gone away and done this uh this this thing that we're not going to talk about
00:32:14
but it's turned into the cargo storage room so yes yeah there's a good sort of save well we want i mean you know for me as an art director i want you know i want my team to feel like they can take those little forays off if they won if they've got a good idea um and you know luckily this time it's yeah it's panned out yeah and makes good use of the space i mean because like i said the ship is it is quite big so then we get to the fun part which is when we get onto promo uh i think it's everyone's favorite part involved with this sort of stuff and that is really sort of i call it selling the dream so it's um you know you're really sort of honing in into what a player's experience might be um and i i love doing this sort of stuff as well so um so here we've got you know
00:33:02
fully loaded carrier the core of what that ship is for like you have these these smaller carrier-borne ships is what chris likes to call them that they're not deep space fighters they can't go long distances by themselves they they need to be from a parent ship the the liberator is unless you've suddenly got an idris to carry things with this this is this is what you're going to see going through these wide and long stances like pyro is incredibly large compared to stanton and stanton's already quite big to go from one side to the other so we really need these ships to help you lug all your stuff from point a to point b because if you do it in your in your hornet
00:33:50
that's going to be i don't know 50 100 little stops whereas you cram in one of these and send it on its way it's going to be a much better experience for everyone yeah yeah absolutely no i think this is going to be a fun one to kind of get on to yeah yeah i think your team's going to like that that's pretty much it for the anvil liberator um ship transporter it's called two-man crew designed for for hauling three spaceships and some ground vehicles uh long distance very cool let's let's talk about the banning merchant then it's that that ship that's been around for for a long time a long time now fans
00:34:40
been waiting quite a while for this yeah we haven't really shown a huge amount of it beyond those original concept images so no and i think um you know this is my second round on this so i think maybe like three years ago we did a we did an initial concept round around the time of the defender i guess we i can't remember so long ago yeah yeah but sure let's um i think fans are going to love this so there's a few things that need to be updated for the merchantman uh obviously we've talked about this many times in the past as star system develops things get added things get refined we improve our workflow number one thing we had to do was look at the size and the scale of the ship
00:35:27
because i think it was it was 160 meters wide 160 meters long so it's in essence a cube yeah but it's a very tall ship as well yeah but it was it was very vague because we had never done a full layout so not not to like the new system yeah so we need to make sure it fit everything in so it was a good starting point um the cargo numbers were they've never really been changed since they were originally concepted as freight units not standard cargo units so the scale of cargo has changed since we did it originally i remember freight union yeah it was it was yeah it was a long four miles ago the marketplace slash bazaar yeah need to have a good working out and then lastly uh we wanted to have some synergy between the defender and
00:36:16
the merchants so we we found a way to get a defender hangar on board so that obviously has big consequences for the so let's talk about the exterior i guess the thinking about it seems so seems so long ago since i started on this um but the addition of the the defender to the basically had the biggest impact in a way like just because because the defender is not a slim ship is it no it's deceptively big to me like the defender i always think in my head it's this tiny little thing but in flight mode it's quite slim yeah and then when it's landed it's got this sort of you know big stance yeah so um this has been i can't i think i've probably been on this for maybe a year something like
00:37:04
that now um and i said before you know we we did an initial round of concept work and it was sort of done more in isolation so we didn't really have full interior we sort of treated it more as okay we need a corridor we need an idea of a marketplace we need an idea of a bridge um and you know we'll kind of sort of uh piece them together and so that was maybe like three years ago something like that and obviously process has changed you know as we've discussed today it's more about the player experience and the flow and things making sense less less rule of cool if we still have the coolness we want it to work right you don't want it to be frustrated i think i think when you kind of do it like obviously there's
00:37:52
big ships you think oh yeah you know we can make whatever room this size maybe it'll be fine but that kind of always sets us up for just a lot more headaches when it comes to to our size of by you spending the time to actually like fully flesh out the interior it just saves us so much time when we come to actually do the production side of it takes all that risk away from us and puts it up front onto on to you basically so thanks people yeah yeah you're welcome i mean we've tried we've tried hard i mean you can see here that you know the ship did have to scale up yeah we talked about earlier we have those those hanger metrics and scaled up it now doesn't fit it doesn't fit the hangers we'll get to the i think we'll get to the solution in a little bit yeah and just a quick shot of the front and you can actually see that from the front it hasn't actually
00:38:40
changed that much you know it's grown a little bit in height but you know gained a little bit of body mass but overall pretty pretty similar i mean we've you know sort of you know the ethos of this whole thing is you know the ship was really cool anyway like everybody really liked the ship so it wasn't that we wanted to change it just for change's sake it was just we need to make it work we do need to advance it and so between myself concept artists mike oberschneider and mark gibson one of the cigs designers we've we basically met twice a week every week for months and basically gone through the ship from top to bottom inside to out there's a huge
00:39:28
amount of yeah yeah and you know hands down this has been the most difficult and hardest ship to date i went i've not had a nervous breakdown actually you know the whole process has been quite nice in a way um but it's just been long it's the long it's the i think this is the one that like it's a marriage to begin with i was really scared and then the kind of like the closer you kind of got to finish in your work the kind of like the less scared i'm getting and the more excited i'm getting and i'll probably have when we get into production i'll be like oh no what we're going to do and then then again once we kind of actually kind of get over that hurdle because it is a it's quite an intimidating shift not like just visually but but like yeah i mean there's a lot of cool stuff i mean we're seeing here the sort of hangar opening
00:40:15
um so basically we've you know the one of the sort of design philosophies of the banu ships is they they sort of incorporate tech where it suits them so they use tech from humans they use tech from xi'an whatever suits them to sort of achieve what their needs are so for this ship we've leveraged a lot of xi'an tech so it's a lot of that essentially levitation tech so stuff doesn't have to be physically connected to move sort of it sort of hovers and then and then shifts along it's it's basically even a lot of opportunity for creativity so hanger here you know it's always multi-part as well so it's always kind of nice basically shot from the front this is with the front guns out which are
00:41:02
s8 that's yeah big size 8 guns one of the the original core cool things of the dimension was all its weapons are sort of tucked away and and hidden so it gives you that non-threatening aura to start with and when it needs to then everything so it's gonna be quite a powerhouse really isn't it like yeah yeah yeah it's it's under this turret it's a proper and there's a proper transformer this yeah i mean there's probably no area that doesn't transform almost especially on the exterior and again you know like john said it's just to keep with that kind of like oh you know just a friendly trader yeah just a family trainer don't worry about me just going on my business and then suddenly everything just pops out and it's all business so again sort of multi-stage animation for the guns
00:41:51
again for the turrets um i mean the turret featured in the original um you know there was a hidden it was never really fully explained there was a turret uh man turret there that you could get in and defend with and it was in that top fin i guess yeah and when when you know when the weaponry is unmanned it's a lot easier we can get away with a lot smaller spaces once you put a person in it then it's a whole different ball of wax yeah just the player experience and it's it's a twin twin gun between s5 so it's not giving you a little tickle it's quite a big punch even though it's only a [Music] you know a torah a gunner you you still kind of take all the consideration
00:42:37
you're taking in a like a piracy in terms of their visibility and everything else and yeah yeah yes you know you expect to see the big guns in the silhouette and get that kind of like the real feel of being in a gunner's seat but like say it's quite easy for it's just growing complexity quite quickly so i mean basically we've you know we've used the gm tech again to help us sort reveal the turret also to elevate the turret um still you know we've had we've got multiple ideas for that so i think we'll just have to figure that out a little further on and then these i mean these these guns look tiny yeah and if they're still so these are guns that most fighters have equipped to them but they're on these um point defense turrets so obviously
00:43:24
the ship was big to start with it's bigger now it's more of a target for missiles and torpedoes and one of the best ways we have in game to counter those is these automated point defense turrets so i know again well humans have these phalanx style guns that shoot down incoming threats we'll we'll take that and we'll use our own guns uh so there's it's got four of these on the whole so there's two on top near the bridge and then i think we see the other two uh underneath so you've sort of got your your 360 degrees protection from from missiles from those and then there's a an additional pair of size 4 remote turrets under the wings these are controlled from the bridge the bridge crew mentioned them so yeah it's it's not lacking on it's not like the thing is it can carry
00:44:12
a fair amount of cargo and and you know it's got some training flooring yeah livelihood yeah you kind of need to make sure that i mean basically that yeah there's a it's a bit of a tardis it's a bit you know there's a as people will see there's a whole bunch of extra stuff that we've squeezed into this compared to the first one so there's always been this feature on the on the banner is there on the original but it never really had a function you know some people called it the paddle some people call it the flipper but chris was like okay needs it needs a reason to be yeah yeah it is very dominant yeah i'll always remember that one bit of defender concept art where it's just there just destroying a mountain just dragging it so we've um you know it's it's a multi-function
00:45:00
essentially because one of the difficulties was at the top of that flipper fuel scoop sorry um is basically the entrance to the marketplace for traders and the public so it was you know there's that challenge of what it needs to look uh you know it needs to do its job but also needs to look visually appealing because it's going to be the entrance um so there was and we'll see that a little in a second but it was yeah it was always it was always a bit of a tricky thing to solve and so you know again we're seeing here the as john mentioned earlier the ship got wider and didn't actually fit on a landing pad which which meant we had no hangers that it would officially fit in could only ever officially land at docking
00:45:47
stations with docking ports or on a planet surface which is you're as a trader you're missing out on all the places you could land to do trading so we had to find a solution i mean the funny thing is this is this is the mo this is the simplest of the of the um of the solutions that we came up with and there's probably like 10 others that we did some of them was super crazy you know part you know parts just folding back on each other and all sorts of things so but in the end i think i mean simplicity wins out i mean it's it's they're not small bits of wing to move yeah yeah yeah it's kind of something there's gaps here we you know we haven't got the mesh in there but there will be we'll we'll work it out for you man so you can see here this is basically a shot of
00:46:34
what is the fuel scoop but it transforms again and becomes this pathway to the marketplace so you'll have this basically why this experience again is kind of the red carpet treatment you're walking up into it's not in this image but you know we will have hopefully we'll have like softs like awnings basically that will sort of come out as well and so i'll have that sort of marketplace i think for me this is one of the ships that really excites me because um it's very different to you know not all a lot of the ships we've kind of we've done um and i think that sort of like initial experience like you say you've seen this thing kind of like come and land down and and the trade is kind of inviting you in and entering into you know it's it's very otherworldly
00:47:22
kind of entering up that walking up those steps out of you know one of our kind of space stations like our human space stations absolutely kind of really exciting to kind of i mean the idea is that as you go up those stairs you'll have you know holographic visuals of products that are in the marketplace and so that will sort of pop up and just be spinning so you'll have like it's again it's just that sort of shopping experience and it's like okay i can get that and get there or maybe even artifacts that the traders picked up i mean you've got options basically so um and then also the cargo chain cargo is a big topic um it was one of those things in the the original concept even digging out the
00:48:10
original design brief was wasn't particularly clear on was the cargo bay internal was it external was it yeah was it a walkable space and we came to external for the first half of this development and and then uh it's during a meeting where i think a bunch of us in there with chris and we were all like oh no it's internal and then someone else says i don't know it's external and let me just decide like let's make it enclosed um it will keep the the styling of how it was in the original concept so you have that sort of to how you want to call it shuttering or on the outside yeah i'm struggling to actually remember it now because i'm kind of like not locked into this one but it was more that it was it was you saw the cargo crates didn't yeah they were exposed certainly from
00:48:59
underneath you could see them all yeah they were tops top mounted and they could all drop down but that caused huge problems with the entrance case where if they could all drop down at the same time then you couldn't get in the ship to start with so we did have a solution this is definitely better yeah so now it's now it's enclosed you just have one way of dropping at the front and then we'll see later how it's all managed inside so you just have you can have the front ramp open and cargo coming up and down the two the two systems are not interfering with each other your cargo's more protected as well yeah and that's kind of i guess a key element of it isn't it is is you know not only having the um like footfall into your your marketplace but these big trade items you're going to need to
00:49:46
deliver them yeah yeah yeah so we're going to move on to um so we've been looking at sort of uh sort of functional images of you know basically explaining um how we've been dealing with design decisions and how that's affected art so now we move on to the sort of the sexy stuff of looking at how we've taken the sort of the existing banner materials you know from the early merchantmen which there was a lot of good stuff on that and then just progressing it a little bit further and you know again this is still probably you know this is subject to change still you know it's it's previous but in terms of where it's heading you know it's really quite exciting and so um you know not everything is modeled in this so you know there probably will be
00:50:35
more folds in the metal kind of like there is on the defender yeah if you look at the concept images versus where it all ends up pivoting on those those arms yeah there's a lot more details there's a lot more yeah there's a lot more sort of intricate sort of folding of the metal and so we're just working in with kind of sort of turning it into more it is more ornate it's more of a sort of a sort of special item essentially um and sort of really trying to sort of get that impression so you know we're layering in the gold we're layering in the sort of all the um sort of art nouveau line work sort of with a sort of banner you know we're looking at sort of taking sort of uh
00:51:25
materials like opal or whatever the status and equivalent is of that and also integrating that into the ship so it really is sort of a display of wealth yeah like if you've got this you you're loaded crown during your fleet it is so you know i think it you know it's it's going to some really nice places and so you know we're looking at this heavy bruiser of a turret um and this is still working progress you know ideally there would be more work to do with this and so we'd get more of the sort of um curvature in the in the metal work and stuff but because we're on a you know because of time scale and stuff we've got to make some compromises but um we'll pass that information on yeah yeah i'm sure we'll get a good kick off on this one i like this on this one yeah
00:52:13
it's good so that's the exterior um we'll move on to the interior um yes we'll go over how it was how it is and then we'll go on a magical mystery tour through the interior yeah yeah so it was a lot simpler wasn't it back in the day it was pre-pre-metric so we didn't have all the requirements no components no components the marketplace is a lot simpler in here and so with with banu merchantman 2.0 or in my head it's 3.0 um you know we basically moved on to fully upgraded interior roll drum and so you can see from this
00:53:01
cutaway and it's kind of hard to show all the pathways in this ship and i feel like i'm banging this drum but again we did a lot of work on pathways and navigation and so you can you know as a trader you're locked off to a certain route as a crew you you've got access to everywhere but as a trader you're like okay well you've got these areas you can get to you can come in from the docking collar and there's two different docking collars you know there's there's the larger one on one side and then ship to station and then that funnels you into the marketplace and then you can go back down to the flipper or vice versa the fuel scoop and so you know in terms of what's changed you know you know just we've had to create space for the cargo
00:53:48
of you know the hanger for the defender that was a massive one so a lot of just shifting just shifting the internals around um you know there's two elevators in this there's one for crew there's one for traders again i think i think that kind of like builds on the experience of someone coming to buy stuff there though and to me that's kind of like part of the the lure of the ship is that you know like say the the crew have their own everything but the kind of like the people that are coming to spend money that experience is like the kind of like one of the core elements of that ship that's what makes it kind of special different experience to yeah coming on board it that way versus living on board it and yeah totally working on world and so we'll see here that these are like previous images these are straight
00:54:36
straight out of 3d studio max with a bit of photoshop magic but it's just giving you an idea of that going up the fuel scoop or or the market entrance you know you'll have the you'll have the awnings all folded out should be a real grand experience well we have red carpet i kind of i don't know why my head is like aladdin's cave do you know what i mean yeah this what it kind of and we've got we had some reference images as well oh okay for the marketplace and so here you basically you've walked up and you're you're again this is always in this concept uh theory has always been this tree of life essentially so basically you enter at the base of the tree and then it forms the spine that tree branches out and basically reaches to the front of the ship that's the the that's always been this organic
00:55:25
theory the same in the defender you come in the defender up the ramp yes and then you have that big central tree which houses components and then that stretches out and back around to form so the line work in this is is a little more sort of refined into it's it has been less organic um compared to the defender kind of gone for a slightly less alien feeling yeah just like like doesn't feel like it's actually a tree that has grown yeah build the ship around this kind of organic thing it is a ship yeah absolutely and so here um is a capture from 3d studio max just so it's super clear like this is where this is the lower lower floor so the marketplace is split into two floors eight shops on each floor yeah what is it no sorry four shops four shops which
00:56:14
were um and then you have this little walkway that sort of goes over the top you can kind of see here obviously we've got a flying jellyfish but the theory is that there'll be a holographic display and you know hopefully the captain can choose what's on there yeah one special offer for the day it could be special ever could show a weapon could just could just have like butterflies flying around whatever but this really gives you a vibe of you know the complexity of the the banner sort of folded metal that organicness and sort of just that overall experience the headaches that you're gonna cause me yes and that aladdin's okay yeah yeah you've got the little jewels hanging off the all the way i really i really like those like the the kind of like the
00:57:02
treatment of light in a lot of concerts stealing your thunder from future things yeah but the the sort of um you know these jewels and stones that kind of uses light source throughout the ship and i think that's kind of like really nice just like a bit different yeah fluorescent tube yeah led lights or so we really sort of pushed on that on this one and so here is like in this basically as part of the tree of life in the in the marketplace is the elevator shaft and so you can then go up there into the negotiation game which was in the original one of the the images everyone remembers from the original concept was that room with the table and yeah over the cargo and so we've kind of kept that and we'll come to that in a second but before you get there you come out of the elevator and you're sort of in a in a central
00:57:51
corridor which also leads to guests habitation rooms in law these trades often take a long amount of time so there's a lot of back and forth with the narrative team on the ship in particular with how how do banu trade how do they eat how do they because for the defenders of very small scale it's long duration um these trades can take days weeks or maybe months so the people that are coming on board to trade need a place to stay whilst and it's not like you know the people that are going to be kind of flying this they don't have a well you might have to have like a base operations like this is their this is their home yeah so you know like you say if you're trading your i guess some of these things could be their livelihood that you know they're trying to trading these really
00:58:39
expensive high-end items and that's kind of and you want them to feel special yeah you know the thing about this always has been you know making making people feel you know that they're in something quite unique and so you can see here you know in this it means we've got massive gemstones there could be whatever but you know in terms of lighting opportunities you'll the caustics and the lights you know if they're rotating there's a lot of cool opportunities and so here is the conference room which just mentioned in the original concept it was smaller a lot more compact but obviously the ship has got bigger and therefore we've got more space but also it's it's a display of wealth right if you can afford to waste a bit of space essentially you know if you could be like you know i
00:59:27
don't need to pack it with everything you know just go make this uh player experience where everyone feels sort of relaxed and so that's kind of what we've been pushing with so there's a lot of there's a lot of commonality that we've taken the original and fed into this but then pushing pushing further so again you can see the sort of like carved gemstones inlaid inlaid with more gemstones inlaid with gold and so again you know in terms of player experience it's going to be totally different to anything that's happened and we've still kept that viewpoint looking into the into the hangar so cargo ray sorry into the cargo bay and yeah it's it's been quite a tussle trying to
01:00:14
trying to get everything into place and then this is an example of um one of the one of the habs for like if you if you want to if you're doing long-term trading and this is a really sort of based on again keeping with the organic theme the bad new shapes but pushing in a slightly different palette and materials and so it's kind of based off of the interior of the nautilus shell and so you can't really tell from here but actually it circles back on itself so there's a little internal wall there that you go behind and that's where toilet and shower and all that sort of stuff is and then you've got the bed in the back and then you've got lockers and little seating areas so you kind of like it a real sort of organic journey so
01:01:02
just pushing on leveraging that giant tech as well so the chairs and the desk and even the lights are just sort of held held in space um quite different quite different and so that's that's where the traders go but the crew obviously he's got access to the full and so slightly less grandiose but not so the docking cargo um that docking corridor is is still quite elaborate can be shared between yeah it's more of a shared space there's some more technical elements in there in terms of venting and stuff and we still want to you know this has always been a theory of you've got your
01:01:50
superstructure then you've got your tech and then you've got your layering of um the bloody work yeah cladding yeah and then you know there'll be there'll be areas where the sort of tech is revealed and stuff and so by balancing those two the proportions you sort of you can kind of like alter the feel of the space and i mean it's going to be a it's going to be a journey for you guys like how you know how we achieve all this but this is the corridor leading to the uh from the docking area and so you've got that great big green ring which kind of sort of you know that kind of put their that there and kind of thinking of it shows green when it's safe yeah you know the docking you know there's not
01:02:37
some kind of vintage going on yeah i was having a conversation with the team this week actually about that exact thing about kind of communicating to the player but not in just a you know as simple as something flashing on a screen or whatever else but just having something a little bit a little bit more elegant so i think again this will give you some really good opportunities and again it's just the new materials the folds um and you know moving on to the habitation section where sort of crew can go people who are familiar with the defender will really sort of see the sort of common common thread here so you know the amount of gold and shiny stuff to put it bluntly is reduced and so it goes to more matte materials you know it's a little less display of
01:03:26
wealth it's a little more functional but still got that 3d printed you get a lot of that sort of like layering in here as well yeah yeah that's in the middle is the what we call it the magic tagine yeah ultimately so it's fed from underneath and you you know you choose what you want and then it appears and the top comes off and you get your food out yeah and you get cut already you can speak to narrative for a while about sort of how our aliens eat that could be a whole talk in itself i feel it's a tricky one because it's a it's a nady and it's a banu ship but it's got to support humans yeah operating it um if you had an entirely banana crew if you were playing azerbainu then some aspects of this you don't need but as yeah humans they cater for both yeah yeah yeah
01:04:17
and so yeah a lot of a lot of complex stuff to sort of get our heads around engineering this is a work in progress shot so i'll put a favor a bit so i really like this and you can't really tell from this shot but it's essentially set over three levels you've got that main middle level and you can sort of get a mini lift to drop down to components or walk upstairs to some elevated stuff but essentially this is leading to the main central engine and that is like sort of counter rotating all those elements and so you get this awesome um shadow play basically going on in the room like really sort of cinematic looks extremely cool in in motion just if we can tie it to you was it were you talking about with tying it to damage or the state of the
01:05:06
it sounds like a good idea so i'm going to say yes so yeah if the engine's malfunctioning and it's sort of slowing down and stuff that would be kind of cool i'll take i'll claim that one okay and then you know in terms of the cargo space what we're looking at here is like the 32 scu sort of cars these are the big cargo containers that you see in all the the rest stops and the cargo decks these are those like the modern day big cargo shipping containers yeah they're quite hefty and you can't you certainly can't pick them up by yourself and you can't really do it with handheld tractor beams because you need something big yes so we've got we've got a hefty um moving mechanism in there at the moment which you can control from this position that you can see in
01:05:53
the screenshot that'll be something else to work out ben um you know it will be a really cool area and sort of just below you that's basically where the sort of the loading platform is yeah because it moves the cargo containers into that space and then that space kind of drops down doesn't it yeah so there will be that sort of like i need the bottom one on the third yeah all right okay let's let's shift everything out and give it to that sort of mini game of jenga almost with how stuff is gonna how you're gonna access stuff yeah and all the time you'll be able to see from the negotiation room the tour guide moving as a result of all those changes the the cargo capacity has gone down a little i think it was it was a nebulous number to start with that had
01:06:41
never really been proved out it's still big it's around 2800 which is not a small amount of cargo by any means yeah so it's still well above most ships but until you get to the whole series yeah i was going to say kind of what our whole the hull is over 3 000 so it's well just still yeah it's a lot but it's maybe not quite as much as people were hoping for originally although i think it looks pretty good it does the loss of cargo but you're gaining so much more yeah it's always a give and take with these things of we we could make every ship do everything but then they just become these humongous vessels um so it's a it's always a trade so moving now up to bridge area and what we're looking at
01:07:30
here is very much work in progress i mean we are literally working on this right now in the sort of top left had to think then an image that we created sort of on round two and we're and we're sort of leveraging that heavily so a lot of a lot of those shapes will appear into this new stuff but in this new sort of configuration you're able to access the bridge but you're also able to access the remote not the demand turret it's more of an experience and then also you've got side corridors which leads you to it's got a special name though it's like a it's not a meditation room i can't remember that there was a approved name wasn't there yeah i don't think what it is um it's kind of like a sort of sacred space
01:08:20
where sort of the banu can sort of pay you know we've kind of got sort of equivalent of prayer wheels that's kind of the theory so it's like this little nice little calm space um so that's been quite fun so there's a lot of a lot of the areas on this on this ship are very sort of multi-threaded you know you often have your central area and then stuff coming off it so like i said there's been a lot of a lot of thought even to navigation and in this area also two two lifts which also can take you quickly to other areas from this bridge an eight person crew now um so there's space for four on the bridge obviously there's four uh stations there you have one person that can go to the the manned turrets towards the rear one
01:09:09
person that can fly the defender and that leaves two to to deal with everything else whilst you're flying around because you can still trade whilst flying around but it's probably not the the wisest of ideas if the person who's come on board to trade has left their ship behind so it's i mean it might be good for negotiations it's good for negotiations but the eight crew can then fill the eight shops if you're just land is on a planet somewhere you you call wg you don't obviously don't need to be flying if you landed you can manually shop or you can let one person do do double duty in shops this is a um an example well a full-size image of uh that round two concept of of the bridge and again you can see the sort of the superstructure that's
01:09:58
and all the layering basically so you know you know we have changed the configuration since this image but a lot of a lot of that theory is going to get transposed onto this new one same with the materials and again just continuing with that flow of from from back to front basically always sort of this tree of life and going to the nose of the ship by the time people see this we'll have actually we would have actually had someone start yeah true start working on yourself actually in production now after after all these years yeah it's going to be good this is actually one of the ships that i'm really excited about kind of playing with in-game um it's just such a kind of i'd say it's got that kind of uh full trading experience but it feels
01:10:46
like a proper home that you can can live on and it's got a load of weaponry as well which yeah yeah if in doubt then just yeah get the guns out yeah you will buy it yes so that was the merchant pretty cool uh looking forward to seeing that go into production uh through production because it's by the time people see it it will be in production yep so to close our talk out i thought we would revisit the the idea that we had last time we we did one of these panels we showed some concept ships or some ideas for concept ships and talked about it and everyone voted for them obviously as this is pre-recorded segment we can't interact
01:11:34
with the crowd and uh get a feel of that so fight amongst ourselves i'm wrestle for which one we do at the end jared will uh explain how you can sort of vote or express your preference for what we show today and we will see what comes with that but first let's go over what we did last time so we had this ground mining vehicle concept we had the xi'an small cargo we had the tavaran light fighter people may recognize a sort of a pattern emerging here and then a small refinery ship so let's see what's happened to those over the last few years
01:12:22
so that small ground miner turned into the grey cat rock and the rock ds the gatek raylen was the jian small cargo and that was very close to that that concept thumbnail that he did wasn't it now we have the xperia talon which was the talon light fighter and then the fourth one which is a bit of a a mystery it's a misconception because i wasn't involved with this last time but you've got a couple of my favorite ships in that so yes that's good read your mind in the in the future yeah yeah so that fourth one the small refinery ship obviously people don't know about but uh i can pretty confidently say people will know about it very soon fingers crossed it's a new year we'll do it all again
01:13:09
we've got four more sort of cuts of options here so we go over those option is a big explorer ship so we obviously have the carrick as the the the pinnacle of uh explorer ships but there there can always be more yeah we would like to be a competition of the character really yeah maybe something misky is going to miss line yep i'm down for that then we have a selection of ground vehicles there so there's a there's a right mismatch there so we've got two little small vehicles and uh what looks like a an apc based off the ballista chassis they they all look cool yeah the ground vehicles are kind of um although they're not as grand and exciting as the ships i think they're
01:13:56
just really fun and it's nice they're nice things to work on because they are kind of contained and they are quite small they i was gonna say like less complex but they're probably not that much less complex than a ship because they still require all the same sort of setup and everything else confinement yeah everything in a small space um but i think i think the ground vehicles kind of um they just add that extra element of fun when you are playing with your friends that it's it's um it's not all just about this place we've got some beautiful planets and being able to explore them not by a foot it's good yeah i don't see a floating noodle working there though floating slightly noodle bike that's still on the list yeah pj special yeah yeah a few that i'm
01:14:44
trying to like just wear john down with maybe well maybe option c this hover horror vehicle could be floating big pennies delivery bike delivery quad bike yeah could be you could have like flying green zozo wouldn't you and that would actual kind of landing zones all sorts of difficulties yeah so that's that's we have some gravel of bikes in game at the moment but this is a sort of a more stable secure option because anyone that's flowing graveled bikes has experienced probably some mild terror yeah they're trying to do it's been a while since we've done yeah we've not done a which i think when the last proper gravlev vehicle was well i mean knox it's been a while yeah
01:15:33
the the last option option d is a a bombership so we we have the hercules a2 which is coming this patch uh that obviously carries very big bombs very or collection of smaller bombs it is our only dedicated ground bomber we have bombers like the retaliator and eclipse with them or torpedoes this is this would be another single man getting get out drop your bombs job um so nice and i've kind of said i like all of them but like i think the visual aesthetics of the bombers it's kind of like the single seatbelt they just look they just look i think a hover vehicle for me yeah i'll go for the uh the explorer ship at the start because i said i like big ships i cannot lie do you know i was wondering if you're going to
01:16:21
do it in my head yeah yeah do i stop with this no yeah i think a nice big exploration you can have all your friends on board because that's really where you have the huge amount of fun with star citizen is getting a group of friends together and just going off i just think and causing chaos visually the small little smaller kind of compacts are cool can we have them all john maybe i guess we'll find what happens if we if we do get like a perfect split on the votes yeah like jersey come back and be like oh actually definitely don't come down trying to split the votes yeah so we have to make them all but just double your team ben double the team it could happen i'll try it yeah thanks so yeah that's that's a
01:17:11
a little wrap up at the end of the uh the show so obviously it would have been easier to do this in person but the world we live in doesn't allow that at the moment hopefully next year but yeah i don't know yeah yeah yeah jared will come on in a minute and explain how to vote for these leave your comments and suggestions on them and we'll we'll see what happens that's a wrap for us i'm john furrier i'm the vehicle director i'm ben uh first isn't condone yeah welcome to the club yeah and i'm paul jahan's art director and thanks for watching our ship talk panel

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