Aegis Nautilus Ship Buyer’s Guide
Welcome to a Star Citizen Aegis Nautilus Ship Buyer’s Guide & What We Know about this New Concept Ship which is a Strategic Minelayer with a lot of gameplay planned for the future, that was unveiled at the Concierge event on the weekend and is now available for anyone to purchase. We’ll be talking about the ship, the sale & mine gameplay.
The Nautilus is an expansive ship, encompassing an integrated mine-deployment system, drone-based minesweeping system, and full crew quarters and facilities. However, 400 years of iteration and refinement have made its massive hull feel conveniently intimate, with access and functionality at the forefront of its interior design.
The Ship is 125m long by 72m wide & 26.6m high. It’s recommended to have at least 4 crew on the ship and caters for upto 8. This puts a good bit bigger than the Hammerhead, not much longer relatively by only 10m but much more depth for the ships 3 decks 16m for the HH compared to 21.6m for the Nautilus.
The ship is a minelayer & sweeper as well as being reasonably well armed and armored.
The ship has 4 mine deployers, and these each look to carry 6 mines suggesting the ship can carry 24 active mines at a time.
It can deploy Homing Mines – The Firestorm Kinetics Tephra homing mine is built to establish defensive boundaries. Once armed, it moves towards any hostile target within range. Once it reaches lethal proximity, it detonates with a devastating explosion.
There are Sentry Mines – The VLR-11 sentry mine’s primary role is perimeter defense. Upon deployment, the mine lays dormant until a hostile target enters its range. When activated, it will fire its equipped weapons with high accuracy.
The Ship can also deploy Nemo Drones – The Nautilus is equipped with Saga Datasystems’ tailor-made NEMO Drones (Neutralize and Employ Mine Ordnance), which are specifically designed to safely identify, deactivate, and collect all mines compatible with the Nautilus platform.
The Ship has 3 decks a top deck with a mine depot to safely store ordinance and a control room for the deployment of it’s mines.
The Mid or Main deck has access to the main bridge, a manned turret on each side of the ship each with 2 S3 Guns, a mess hall, crew & captains quarters, engine room, access to escape pods & docking collar.
The Lower of Sweep deck has a drone bay for it’s nemo drones, cargo bay with room for 64 SCU of cargo, access to a big size 7 turret with 2 S7 Weapons & there is a mine bay here as well for the drones to bring deactivated mines back and repurpose them to be deployed again by the Nautilus.
There is central elevator access in the ship to all decks.
The Ship is laden with Large Components, 2 Power Plants Fuel Intakes, Coolers and 3 Shield Generators… those generators and power plants should allow the ship to be pretty tanky.
The Ship also has what appears to be a S3 Missile Turret on it’s belly in addition to it’s S7 turret on the nose of the ship and 2 S3 turrets on the sides all these turrets are manned.
It has a drone system for mine retrieval, disarming and repurposing as well as a Mine Laying System that is listed as a S7 component.
It’s exected SCM speed is expected as 115m/s currently.
Each of the homing mines are equivalent to a Size 5 torpedo.
The Sentry Mines have 2 s2 hardpoints.
These mines lay dormant until a hostile target enters range and then their activate.
The Sentries are supposed to be highly accurate, while the homing mines will follow the first detected target and attempt to proximity detonate.
The Drones when released find mines, defuse them and then bring them back to the ship from both the host and third party ships. The Ship is equipped with 2 Nemo Drones.
During the Conceirge event it was suggested that more types of mines may be added in the future. Mines have small thrusters allowing them to maintain position, to slow down stablized after geting dropped or to get closer to a target, the thrusters won’t be strong enough to counteract strong gravities though, so no minefields directly above planets.
Mines will be relatively expensive and need to be maintained so to not lead to giant never ending minefields and blockades. Mines can be found via scanning and have signatures like a ship. Mines will be in SQ42. CIG seem to be already experimenting with mine gameplay.
The Warbond versions of the ship for $675 (that you can’t use store credit on) give you a sequentially unique serial number as well as LTI Insurance.
Non-Warbond it’s $50 more at $725 and comes with 6 months insurance.
If you are a Concierge Member you have access to buy the Solstice Version of the Ship as a $675 warbond it just has the Solstice Skin as a variant – Which is white with yellow highlights.
There is also some physical merch available for the Nautilus – T-Shirt, Poster Set & Mouse Pad as well as a bundle with all of it.
We are awaiting a Q&A post on the ship, there is no ETA for the ships completion, nor date when the concept is supposed to end yet, though it’s typically around 4-6 weeks.
The Nautilus is quite an exciting ship, we knew that CIG wanted a minelayer for a while and this has some interesting gameplay to it.
I expect the Nautilus to be a reasonably tanky ship and some good forward facing weaponry.
So it would be relatively effective in a fight or supporting in a battle.
The Drones for mine sweeping give it a away to support a fleet BUT also i suspect we will see mine clearing missions generated by the game, you could even use the drones to effectively just steal other peoples mines and nom them up.
In the brochure for the ship it implies that mines aren’t really welcome in UEE territory and I do expect it to be a crime to deployed mines in some systems.
That mine laying gameplay is going to be used to secure areas, perminiters, aid in fleet battles, protect assets, set traps and I can see it being used to protect asteroid fields and POI that players discover.
As a side not this makes the idea that CIG will also add various buildable buildings and defenses for the ground more likely as well. In fact I hope we could see buildable stations potentially in the future too.
Mines are an interesting one as they need to be correctly balance, not mega op BUT should slow an enemy down or deny them an area.
How hard are they to detect, can you easily take them out with fighters? How expensive are mines, how often do you need to maintain them, WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO BE USED TO PROTECT and where can you deploy them.
There is still a lot of questions to answer about them & I’ll get a video out again once we have had the Q&A and some of those questions have been answered.