Inside Star Citizen: Ironclad is Rad

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   it's part two of our Invictus launch week coverage as we look beyond the event to the new offering being unveiled at this year's Drake defense gon the far superior brand excluded from the usual Invictus festivities because it's too damn cool I said it and I'm tired of pretending it's not true Drake for life these sentiments were recorded in April before that rap beef stuff and disco would like it known that K dot is King # Westside also that David is the best woohoo now we resume the program let's Force JN crew to talk about it now so in the star say in Universe we have a lot of cargo ships but they're sort of concentrated around the lower end of cargo hauling sort of the low hundreds SE and below and the very high

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   end where there's multi thousands there's a mix of cargo ships which have their cargo on the inside ones on the outside like the whole series and we really wanted to bring something different where it's sort of sits right in the middle it's a nice progression step and facilitates both internal and external loading of cargo which is where the Drake ironcloud comes [Music] in so the Ironclad is the kind of Next Step Up For for Drake cargo ships it kind of Builds on what the caterpillar

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   brings but in a a much larger form the Drake Ironclad is a six-person multi crew armored Freer a large proportion of the ship is dedicated to the cargo bay at the front of it which has both a front ramp for loading and unloading cargo and small vehicles on the ground as well as a retractable roof for doing that in space with Eva as well little tight entrances to cargo ships doesn't necessarily lend itself to when you're out in deep space and you're trying to quickly move some cargo from one person's ship into your ship really you want as much kind of access to be able to do that as you possibly can so by having this kind of much larger opening on top of the ship it allows us to kind of bring Cargo in much easier so its role being a sort of armored freighter comes from two distinct ways one the cargo itself is more protected

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   it's within the cargo bay that has the armored roof section that covers it so like say a whole SE where the cars on the outside you can load it from the outside but then protect it with the Ironclad is also more heavily armored than the cillar so it kind of gives a little bit more security to your kind of precious cargo the exterior very classic Drake brutish styling a whole lot of engines and a lot of framework and quite thin structural elements support the rest of the ship very Bare Bones styling it doesn't have lots of nice padding it's all there and exposed and it's really just sort of rugged into the point so the Ironclad is really three distinct areas you have all the accommodation in the rear sort of third of the ship the front 2/3 is really just this

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   cargo bay with the front entrance and the retractable roof and then you have the Command Module which has seats for the crew plus a few little jump seats for everyone else Command Module is there to steer the ship when it's attached and the Command Module serves as the Escape pod as well the only time you really want to detach it is in an emergency it's not designed to be your sort of primary chip flying around it kind of gives you a little bit of a get out of jail free card if you're transporting stuff that is quite valuable quite sort after in maybe some of our less desirable systems what it allows you to do is kind of have a little bit of security so if you're getting attacked or you're you know you're getting yourself into trouble if you want to save yourself you can kind of jet in your cargo and try and get out of Dodge and kind of get out to safety

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   and I think that's like a really important thing as we get closer to death of a Spaceman with some of the recent Tech that's come online this brought us one step closer to implementing command modules properly so not only will you see this uh detachable Command Module featur on the Ironclad but as well it will happen on the caterpillar interior wise you've kind of got two entrances onto the ship um you can either enter via the Command Module and that takes you straight into a kind of corridor section it's kind of like almost like a mezanine um you can either go go up to the habitation area which uh top floor of the ship gives you like super nice views out both the the kind of cargo out the front and the the rear of the ship or you can kind of come down the ship into the main uh habitation area alternatively you can enter through the dock and colar airlock which on the opposite side of the ship at the rear of the interior of the

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   ship we've kind of got the the heart of the engines it's the big kind of engineering area where we've got all of the kind of main functional components needed for moving such a large ship and then if you kind of come slightly further forward got the we call it the kind of like the Command Deck um it's not a bridge you you can't fly the ship from it but it's where you operate the tractor beams it's where it kind of gives you good views out over the front and into space you've got the track to beam turrets but also you know visually you can kind of stand in this area or sit in this area and look out over the front over the bow of the ship and kind of really see what you're trying to pull in or what you're trying to capture into your cargo hold we come downstairs we've got a little kind of covered area at the rear of the cargo hold and that is where you can store a couple of small ground vehicles or some of your equipment for moving

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   vehicles and cargo around and then you're into the main cargo hold of the ship and this takes up the majority of the Interior Space is this large cargo hold one of the things that we were kind of really Keen to do was give lots of different views and different angles down into this cargo hold again as we're exploring slightly less lawful systems we wanted to give the players as much opportunities as we can to kind of be safe aboard their own ship so um either side of the cargo hold we've got these uh gantries that run completely front to rear on the ship and they give great view down into your cargo bay they also give that opportunity of if there's someone tries to board you via the cargo bay it gives you some nice cover opportunities and we've also got a few little windows that

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   kind of look down into it as well as you move to the kind of like the very front very nose of the ship those gantries lead into kind of secure cargo area it's somewhere that's a little bit more difficult to get to when you kind of enter the ship the big thing we were referencing when we were looking at it was this idea of police evidence rooms so these kind of individual cages where you could put your most secure cargo whatever it might be in this area and it would make it quite difficult to try and breach in or out of that area so it gives us just somewhere a little bit more secure for kind of smaller cargo items finally at the B front we've got access to one of the main turrets and the track turret the biggest attraction for me with it is just the versatility of the cargo space from a good citizen law standpoint it is a cargo ship but also

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    that retractable roof and the tractor beams on board it give it some less legal opportunities for perhaps taking other people's cargo ships in space and on the ground at the time of recording we're also exploring a more military themed variant of the Ironclad doesn't have the name yet so we'll just call it the Drake Ironclad assault compared to the base ship this has been developed to support ground assault operations it has additional turrets covering the upper and lower surfaces to provide more fire support and the front section of the cargo area has been redesigned to enable our largest vehicles in game to be deployed from it such as the tank in addition the cargo bay has been reduced in size to facilitate a onboard repair facility so for those of you who want to have a journey in the cargo profession traditionally you would start out in

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    something say like a a h the next step up from there really is sort of into Drake caterpillar territory uh so you're doing roughly a 8 to 10 times jump in cargo capacity from there the Ironclad sits nicely between those smaller ships and the much larger bulk carriers such as the whole sea and then ultimately you get to things like the whole de and Kraken at the the end of the cargo career you said Kraken yes was that a hint at anything it's not a hint at anything the uh making the ironcloud makes the Kraken easier so building out the Ironclad does of course kind of help us with building out the Kraken I think increasing that visual library of assets that we can pull from and use um in a drake manufacturer at the right scale is super valuable for when we move on to the large ships

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    of course in non- Drake related news players in this year's event probably noticed the long awaited RSI Polaris touring around the Stanton system well it's not quite flight ready yet but we thought we'd ask the guys for a status update all the same and see if we can't get a closer look at the progress being made while we do it we really want to have some form of the exterior of the pl in Victor's launch week we wanted to mix up the capital ships on display year being a big kind of military show it made perfect sense to be able to kind of show it off in its best light we pushed quite hard to get the exterior to a point where we're happy to show it publicly this meant we've prioritized doing the exterior over the interior so the exterior you see is pretty much final art all it is missing is really

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    the damage setup uh as I'm sure people have tried to do is currently invulnerable well hopefully invulnerable in game visually I think not only have we' been trying to to get it out so we can show it but we've also tried to kind of really push the quality of the exteriors of some of our kind of like large Capital ships and what's that has meant is that we needed to focus a few more artist than what we'd normally put on the exterior of a ship just to make sure we kind of hit that quality bar and we hit it on time it's pretty close to being L zero which means that the majority of the main modeling is done there's still a whole bunch of decal work the finer details what we call as P details task needs to be done and that really kind of helps to elevate the kind of like the close read I think the the distance read and the mid reads are like

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    brilliant and to be fair the the close read when you get up in personal is looking really really good it's just we've still got that kind of like final sprinkle of of Polish to go on with the focus on the exterior and pushing that as far as we could in the time we had the interior is not quite as far along it is more around the gray box stage but the people we' put on the exterior now will be moving on to the interior normally on a vehicle as we tried to kind of keep the development stages in line throughout the kind of like the life cycle of its development it means that the interior isn't you know it's not at the same level that the exterior is we've been focusing on the core traversal areas of the ship the majority of the rooms have now been worked up I think there's maybe two or three rooms that are still in white box that still need you know a decent amount of kind of modeling and and uh work

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    doing to them but the rest of the rooms now are kind of getting to the point where we're pretty close to to gray box so the bridge the main corridors the hab area the cargo bay torpedo rooms and all the turrets so these are a bit further along than some of the more secondary rooms like the brig and the medical Bay when you think of the Polaris like it's key points of the Torpedoes and I think that's been an area that has needed quite a lot of iteration on and we're not quite there yet one of the things that we're kind of really trying to make sure feels good from a player's point of view is the kind of like the loading of the torpedoes and seeing them kind of be from in your cargo hold to being in the kind of like loading mechanism and then being ready to fire so on the kind of like lower deck and front half of the vehicle we've got these big torpedo loaders and that's an

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    area that it's needed quite a lot of iteration to make sure it it feels right and we are still in that process it's not kind of fully signed off we're not completely happy with that area but it certainly kind of makes up the the heart of the ship otherwise on the interior the main upper deck is kind of really starting to come on the engineering section is another kind of area that I think is really important in our Capital ships and kind of getting to a level that we're happy with from the kind of concept to into production we have opened up the bridge of the ship a little bit one of the things we wanted to do was when you kind of enter onto the bridge this should feel kind of like super exciting and super rewarding to the player if they've managed to kind of get one of these ships we want it to feel like they are kind of really living that kind of military life dream so we've spent a bit of time kind of opening it up giving

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    some Nic use as you kind of enter onto the bridge itself what we really wanted to do is kind of make sure that the the player views are good the captain gets a great kind of view out the front and make sure that navigating around that area especially as kind of more and more kind of multi crew gameplay systems come online we want to make sure that there's enough space on that bridge to have not just the captain and the pilot but a whole crew there compared to the concept mesh one not big change but unresolved area was the hanger opening it was just it's quite a complex shape to open so we spent a lot of time working on that that's s resolved and then another thing we are looking at in the future is actually doing some more up gunning of the turrets so it's not just a torpedo boat it can sort of hold its own against

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    other Capital ships with its turrets you'll see more of that as we get closer to releasing it which we are aiming for at IE this year so what do we learn this week well we learned that the Drake Ironclad is the next cargo ship from Drake designed to fill that gap between the caterpillar and the larger whole series offerings that working on it helps to flesh out resources needed to bring the long awaited crack into life in the future and that the Polaris is coming along pretty nicely even if it's not Drake which we didn't learn was the best because we all already knew that in our hearts but disco says K do is the best and with that this very long 17 episode season of ins Star Citizen comes to a close we said we'd go straight through until Alpha 323 was out and we did that and then some more and

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    it's time for our team to take a breather catch up on some admin work and begin working on the next great season of ISC that'll start up again on June 20th so for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared hucke thanks for taking the time to let us share the process of game development with you each week and we'll see you when we get back welcome I for