Star Citizen a Closer Look at The Carrack
The most requested Star Citizen video I get at the moment is to take a look at and talk about the Anvil Carrack. We have actually seen quite a lot of it during the 2949 CitizenCon Demo BUT there has been a lot more Discussion and work on the ship since then and we should see the ship in Star Citizen
The Anvil Carrack is planned to be released by the end of February 2020 probably in a 3.8.2 Patch. It was delayed from the Initial Release of 3.8.
The Anvil Carrack is Long Range Expedition, Pathfinding & Exploration Ship.
It’s the Top End Explorer Vessel that is currently planned for the game.
It is supposed to be at least according to it’s original concept, a single, self-sustaining ship that can make long-duration voyages through the roughest areas of space. It’s designed specifically for transiting jump points, dealing with extreme conditions in space and getting back home. In Lore it was originally built as a military mapping ship.
The Carrack was one of the older ships that was Concepted Nov 2014 after being a stretch goal for hitting $33m but then they had to make larger to fit all the rooms they wanted, as with the older concepts they didn’t block out the insides fully before announcing the ship sizes and stats.
This saw the Carrack grow quite a bit from 123m by about 30-40% BUT then CIG decided to bring it back in line and closer to the original size which it now remains at of 125m.
The reasons the devs gave for this was that making it too large would take it away from it’s intended goal and focus, a smaller ship would be more efficient, travel to more places, and be more suited to it’s crew size for 4-6.
The ship is still bigger than it’s original concept BUT a lot of people love bigger ships… and wanted a larger size increase.
The Carrack focuses on Large Components rather than having any Capital Ones, this should make it cheaper to customize, repair and easier to maintain.
Facilities wise the ship has a little bit of everything and it’s kind of the ultimate multirole ship for a small – medium crew, the idea is to have a truly self sufficient ship able to explore for an extremely long period without having to come back to dock.
The Carrack’s Cargo Bay has been put in line with the current Cargo System, which sees the ship with 456SCU of cargo split across 3 Cargo Pods each of 152 SCU. These are supposed to be swappable in the future with the expectation of some modular customization options giving the ship more of different functions at the cost of cargo space.
The Cargo of the Carrack does not take into account lockers for suit, weapon & item storage which it appears to have an abundance of for it’s 6 crew. All this is also in addition to having a Bay for each an Ursa Rover & C8 Piceses Scout. It is confirmed that the Carrack comes with these Vehicles.
For The Crew the Carrack has room for 6 Crew with beds, bathrooms, food & drink area, recreation areas, meeting room. The beds will currently let you logout that, with the addition of the Player Status System v1 food & drink will become important, later hygiene as well.
It has a Medical Bay, we don’t have an indication of how good / what tier of facility it is BUT in the short term it will allow you to set the bed there to a respawn point BUT it’s also somewhere you can heal all your wounds. Later this will be able to treat wounds based on their severity, the idea is that you are able to maintain your crew without having to return to a hospital.
It also has a Drone Bay that houses unmanned explorer drone pods, there are stations in the Drone bay to allow you to remote control them. We don’t know when Drone Gameplay is coming to Star Citizen though, nor do we know the extent to what these drones will be able to do. You’ll be able to launch, retrieve, control and maintain the drones from this bay.
The Ship is supposed to have some form of Repair Facilities as well, the expectation of this is an area for the repair of components, items and that sort of jazz, more work tables, it is possible that the Drones may have the ability to repair the Carrack and it’s parasite vehicles.
I am interested if CIG plan to have those vehicles to be able to be repaired, rearmed and refueled from within the Carrack as well.
The Ship has a combination of extended fuel tanks, top end drives & quick mapping and sensors allowing to travel far, quickly and map along the way.
The Bridge is separated into an upper and lower bridge (and there are elevators and ladders around the ship to make traversal quick and easy. The Upper Bridge has the mapping/holotable and 2 crew stations, the lower bridge has the Captain’s Chair and an additional 2 stations as well.
The Bridge is supposed to have a Blast Shield as well that can extend over the front of the ship.
There are Engineering Decks that give you access to various components of the Ship so that you can repair & maintain them more easily.
The Ship has 2 large manned turrets 1 each on each side of the ship at the rear.
The Ship also have Remote Weapons controlled from the bridge stations.
It was also suggested that the ship may have a manned/remote top turret as well.
With it’s weapons loadout however beyond it’s 2 side turrets we don’t fully know what CIG have done, we could well see a few remote weapons to justify the 5 seats on the Bridge.
At Time of Filming the Carrack is Currently available for $500 or as an Upgrade as part of the Lunar Sale BUT the ship should also be available when it’s release in February. Though we don’t know if the price will go up once the ship is flyable or not. If anyone asks me if they should buy a Carrack and don’t already own one then I would probably suggest that they get it in game in the future… spending $000s on ships isn’t something I recommend… he says… with 2 Carracks in his Hangar.
The Carrack wasn’t Finished at CitizenCon & There were a lot of threads about the Carrack after it was seen at CitizenCon, with some concerned about the differences from it’s Concept Art to it’s looks in game… one of the main comments was about the differences in the engines, with people largely (in the comments at least) preferring the larger engines with the Orange glow from the Concepts. Though there was a lot of other feedback too.
CIG did respond saying that the Carrack is still being worked on and they are taking some of the feedback onboard BUT basically the Carrack at CitizenCon wasn’t finished, by the end of February they will of had 2-3 months more time to work on the ship
What exactly will change if anything with the Carrack remains to be seen, the ship clearly needed lighting and materials passes. A good compromise might be to make the Engines bright orange and glowy.
What I want to know about the Carrack is will it eventually be able to mine and refine quantum fuel as it goes OR does it have such massive reserves and efficiency that it doesn’t really affect long term exploration.
When will the Carrack be available to buy in game Currency AND how much will it be?
I really feel that this is one of the best ships in the game for a crew of 4 – 6 people and allows you to do a bit of everything in game BUT if you want to explore when we have exploration in game that is then this is the ship for you.
Exploration Gameplay is a whole host of other features and tasks that need to come together.
Scanning Updates are something that CIG are working on now and are incredibly important to exploration, detecting things like POIs. Points of Interest are the bulk of what Exploration is to me, CIG are building out more assets and scenes but these range from wrecks, asteroid clusters, ships getting attacked, abandoned stations, random NPC ships / traders, anomalies BUT also potentially things like Jump Points, Wormholes, Alien Tech, Special Missions BUT there is a huge amount of content that could fall under the exploration banner.
It could just be that you want to stay out in Alien or Uncivilised Space for a long Period of time BUT Exploration Missions could be to scan certain things, to gather something, to travel to investigate something, find suitable resources or land with specific resources.
A lot of missions could be a bit more open in the future as well, that is to say if you find something new, then you might be able to sell or hand that data to an NPC or player.
Saving Locational Data is something else which is very important to exploration and information trading as is the ability to share that saved data with another player, set custom waypoints… CIG have previously talked about being able to drop beacons that you can QT to tho these beacons would need to be maintained and could be used or destroyed by others if they locate them.
Also we know that CIG are putting some form of Quantum Fuel Mining/Refining in the game at some point too, more recently there has been leaks of a commodity (Quantanium).