What Ships Are In Development?
Welcome to some more Star Citizen… I’m going to give you some very quick SC news and summary from this week BUT then have a deeper dive into the SCLIVE on ships that they did as, they talked about more ships in active production, updates coming to the 600i, the polaris, corsair, starfarer and a whole lot more!
We did have CI saying although IAE 2951 has ended, our holiday celebration, Luminalia, is starting next week! So gather your friends and family to honor the coming festive season with us in our most giving holiday yet.
So you can expect some Christmas celebrations, things to do and sales most likely.
Alpha 3.16 should be going into testing very shortly and I am expecting CI to be targeting a live build IF AT ALL POSSIBLE for between the 17th – 24th of the month.
We do know the 3.16 patch is quite light on content but does contain that new JumpTown 2.0 event as well as new POI and rewards for exploring them as well as a Grav-Lev Vehicle Rework.
This week’s Sneak Peek was of something from Pyro… as the file name is PyroSneakPeek. But I don’t know if it’s trying to focus on anything in particular other than general prop work.
I do also want to draw your attention to RaftTron that appeared in the ISC as a silly little clip that is basically Jareds brain leaking BUT it is cool none the less. You can grab the wallpaper from the RSI twitter.
They build the ships after the concept phase pretty much BUT don’t deal with bugs.
They prioritize ships that add something to the PU but also ships that they can fit into their schedules. Some ships require additional work or features to come online and might have work broken up into sections. They’d prefer to release ships with their intended gameplay or at least a good chunk of it.
The Mercury Starrunner & Herald don’t have their Data Storage / Running mechanics yet. And the newly released Argo RAFT doesn’t have the ability to actually pickup and drop containers yet but it hopefully will soon. That said the ships are functional and were ready other than having those mechanics completed. So there is a bit of a balance to and there are decisions that they make per ship about their release.
Also although technically the RAFT could have room for more cargo boxes they decided that 3 was the magic number here.
They are working on the 600i interior rework currently trying to fix some of it’s problems and bring it up to gold standard.
It appears it will be getting a medical bay, updated crew quarters, the cargo bay is getting tweaks and the explorer will get more room for a bigger vehicle or vehicles.
The modularity is moving to rear of the ship, it has escape pods, docking collars and external lifts.
The detachable mining bags for ships are being worked on currently, these will let you literally just eject a mining container from your ship and allow another to go grab it and take it to be stored or refined.
The Starfarer is receiving attention, they are giving it the ability to pickup and store fuel canisters so it can then refine them and refuel other ships.
They are going to be updating the interior of the ship as well as making the ship actually be able to fuel other ships.
Ships are being brought up to gold standard where possible, this has them upto date with the current tech, has room ready for physical components, storage areas as well as making sure metrics, airlocks and docking collars are all correct etc…
But sometimes this has other little model and exterior / interior work too.
Weight / Mass and Cargo will change the way your ship flies, especially in a high gravity atmosphere.
They are looking to increase ballistic ammo capacity as part of ongoing balance.
There will be various modules for the Carrack in the future BUT there are various other features and tech hurdles currently.
They have been working on and running some tests with physicalized damage, starting to move away from artificial health pools.
AI Blades, the semi-automous function systems for your ships require computer items to be completed first before being coded. I am very much looking forward to being able to have some turrets controlled by AI for me on some of my larger ships.
They addressed the hex code customization for ships they had talked about in 2016.
They still plan to have the ability to customize your ships with a huge range of colors and potentially this will still be you can change it via a hex code, thats sort of a far future this is the planned goal. There is a bit of concern about how this would affect or devalue currently purchasable skins.
They will be doing some bits for Racing in the future.
Operator Modes are going to get some extra work and will be expanded out to lots of different roles and features.
Ship in ship spawning is a thing still and we will be able to do it from the ASOP terminal at somepoint.
The Polaris interior concept work is completed, all it’s metrics for it’s hangar have been updated and made a little bigger, it can fit a much larger range of ships there now. I mean it’s not massive or anything just they have made it so that you’ll be able to get heavy fighters in there it sounds like.
They have made changes it’s loadout, it has a Capital Shield Generator, Cooler, PowerPlant with some increased component sizes there. They have been bringing it up to current standards. They will be giving us an update on all that soon ish it seems. It is ready to start active development when they have the manpower / scheduling.
The Corsair is in Active Development, They are whiteboxing it and doing pre-production work, they have some teams digging into it moreover the next couple of weeks.
It’s early days.
CI confirmed that the Kraken, Perseus, Apollo, Ranger, Endeavor, Genesis and not yet in active development. John Crewe does think the Endeavour is complex and cause a headache when they tackle it and it’s molarity.
We did have a load more ship based information from CI earlier in the week, please go checkout my video on that and the Banu Merchantman going into active development on my channel.