Star Citizen – The New Drake Cutter – The Best Starter Ship?
Welcome to some More Star Citizen… we have a preview on the New Drake Cutter and the updated Origin 600i rework for the explorer and touring variants.
The Drake Cutter – The Best Starter Ship?
The Drake Cutter is the new straight to flyable ship coming out with Alpha 3.17.4 and the IAE.
The Drake Cutter has the largest interior of any of the starter ships.
It’s built for no-frills get the player from A-B and to do a good variety of basic missions and light combat.
It has a reasonable cargo bay, living area with bed & storage.
The cockpit has a very tactile experience. It has that retro-tech feel of Drake, very clunky but cool.
It’s reasonably tough & has big engines but small manoeuvring thrusters so it’s pretty quick in a straight line. It’s not particularly areo-dynamic tho… it’s a big box of a ship.
It can fit some vehicles… maybe?
It’s got a god amount of room for cargo.
It has large fuel tanks for a starter.
CI compare it to a tiny Cutlass.
It’s got some cool togglable armoured windows.
The 600i Rework
The Original 600i Touring and Explorer had some issues and have since been receiving a big rework. They wanted to address it’s open spaces that had no use and really try to make it a better looking ship internally using their latest pipeline.
The ship is now concept complete with most rooms having a rework.
The modular section that denotes what variant the ship is has moved from the middle to the rear now with the centre of the ship largely being for the common shared areas.
The front & mid of the ship is going to be pretty much the same between the ships with the rear section being where the magic happens.
You can break the ship down into 3 sections, the front bridge and captains quarters, these have remained pretty much the same as before, with some new chairs on the bridge.
Theres a lobby areas on the top deck with a small docking collar.
The opposite side is a lift to take you between it’s floors & exterior of the ship.
Behind the front section you have the crew habitation area, a large open communal space, food area and 4 crew quarters.
Below all this is the components and engineering section. You can expect these components to have changed from the original ship too.
Behind all this is the rear section and where the ships diverge.
On the Explorer, on the top deck there is a large armory, with suit lockers, weapons storage, tables and seating.
Behind this is the hologlobe for use with exploration.
The Mid Deck has a Medical Bay, like the Carrack with T2 med bed.
Beside this is the secondary cargo hold, and is meant for the crew to use for daily supplies & logistics.
The Bottom deck on the explorer has the main cargo hold and garage, this is a much larger bay than previous, for allowing a vehicle here or lots of cargo. There are lifts allow external access or a side one up to the secondary cargo area and other decks.
The Touring is primarily split across just 2 decks.
The upper deck has a large lobby area, there is access to a meeting / eating area and bar.
There are also private guest suites, large and luxurious BUT also with their own escape pods.
The lower deck has a spa, pool, sauna, bar, kitchen.
The exterior is relatively unchanged, there will be some minor tweaks, moving the hangar bay doors, airlock and escape pods for example.
The next step is to get the updated ship into production… which requires them to have some free time to slot it into the schedule.