Star Citizen: Ship Shape - The Mercury Star Runner

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:09

   welcome everybody to another edition of shipshape the semi-monthly show where we go deep into the development of the ships that will inhabit the star citizen universe now whether you're honing your skills in the dogfighting simulator known as arena commander exploring the stanton system and beyond in the persistent universe or saving the day in squadron 42 epic single-player adventure spaceships and vehicles are an intricately interwoven aspect of the very fabric of star citizen's experience and that means ships of all sizes shapes and especially purposes in this episode we're proud to introduce you to the latest offering from crusader industries a manufacturer players have been familiar with since its introduction into port olisar and the surrounding space around the planet crusader in star citizen alpha 3.2 and who have exploded

2. 00:00:58

   back onto the ship making seen in 29 48 with the addition of not only the impressive hercules star lifter but today's reveal of the brand-new mercury star runner yes sleek capable asymmetrical and perhaps most importantly fast the mercury star runner is crusader industries answer to the question when i've gotta move cargo or data from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible and maybe a little something on the side I don't want others to notice what's the right ship for me let's check in now with some of the designers and artists who have been working to bring the mercury star runner to life the mercury star ona is a primarily a data collector but it also has capacity for storage so depending on the day if you want to go collect some data or you

3. 00:01:47

   want to go collect some storage or cargo it's entirely up to yourself really what's the primary goal is to collect data but before you can transport it you've got to capture it be be that from being given the stored data or using the scanners to listen in on data and convert it encrypt it store it and then do the running aspect of it it's got a dedicated scan bay so it's got a little room off to the right when you go into the main area of the ship it's got say a dedicated area where you can go and scan and collect them it's also got four dedicated avionics for scanning then it also has a very large Bank of computers and data pods to store that in it's much larger than the Herold so it can hold a lot more the downside is it's a much larger ship than The Herald so you could be doing multiple trips in a Harold versus spending a lot

4. 00:02:34

   of time gathering a huge amount of data in this and then transporting it the development process for the ship we wanted an asymmetrical ship we looked at a very cool asymmetrical ship which was the Millennium Falcon and luckily enough we've got a toy model of the Millennium Falcon right next to our desk but Mike had just recently worked on the star lifter so we had to look over the Genesis Starliner and tried to implement some of that in what you see now taking the Crusader style there was developed for the star lifter and transposing that onto something that has to look first huh speaks asymmetrical with it being as Harris for ship there was a lot of iterations in terms of just sketching out ideas because they're quite fast sometimes it's hard when you have too many things to look at so basically you know I'll pick five or six and we'll

5. 00:03:23

   start trying to just hone it down to what I think Chris will like so that we have like a generally like three options for him to look at when we're looking at shapes we always have to think about thruster placement and asymmetric ships always cause troubles on that side because the best or strongest thruster layout is a very symmetrical sort of cube or elongated shape where all the thrusters are in line with each other they can all count to each other equally if you don't have the hull to support that they you have to compromise it somewhere when we were building this ship we knew we wanted to have the asymmetric shape some of the early versions are very very different to the final form and they all suffered from that so we tried various explorations to see how we could keep the asymmetric look but keep it symmetrical in terms of its thruster placement with the style after it was soft curves there was you know it had a

6. 00:04:13

   double wing and we still you know we kept some negative space between that so we took those things across but this is more angular but it works in terms of just sort of you can't make a cargo ship into a vast data or no things have to change the interior I got to make it slightly asymmetrical as well which was really fun I see it as like you know it's flyable level so in the break area at the hollow chess table that we've put in there has a little switch on it so you can press it that goes down into the floor and splits open you can go into the ventilation system you know you can be running around and the ventilation system you don't really quite know where they are so they come caught behind you and then you know you're like oh no I've been ambushed so you can kind of sort of play a game of you know almost whack-a-mole you know you think someone's over there

7. 00:05:00

   oh and then they pop up over here and you know it could make for a quite interesting sort of combat experience it just adds that little extra level of gameplay that I really wanted to integrate into it because you know it's got purpose and also it should be really fun you know especially if you don't know where they are weapon wise it has to land turrets in the cargo area which have a size too so if you're getting shot up from the bottom or the top you covered it has full 360 as well so you know you can get anyone any pesky people trying to shoot out you and take you down it also has two front pylons as well sighs - as you can see from the cockpit it's totally glass and you can also see the bottom of the cockpit as well and

8. 00:05:49

   you through the cockpit glass you can actually see the guns at the bottom and so it would be some really cool scene that the guns fire and which is what I really wanted I just wanted this totally like just glass might as well show them off yeah some guns fire yeah you know like yes it's fob you know the people I see the one lives in the persistent universe they might have say a Herald or a freelancer and those are great options for those specific roles whereas this is this allows you to do a bit of both I mean I'd buy the ship myself just for the looks of it I think it's gonna make quite a big statement when you see one of these things come in to a truck stop or a space station it's sort of everyone's gonna turn around and look at it so if you're that sort of person

9. 00:06:38

   that's probably where it's gonna be you've never heard of the mercury star runner well it's the ship that made the Charon on less than 12 checkpoints the mercury star runner concept promotion begins today for all backers and keep an eye out for a special reverse the verse townhall later today it's being filmed live from Gamescom in Cologne Germany where backers and attendants will get to ask their questions directly to John and Sarah and others and it will be available on YouTube as soon as it's ready in fact chances are that it's happening right now as this video went live so I better get back to it very shipshape I'm content manager for global video production Jared Huckaby until next time you

10. 00:07:35

    thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library