I have owned a Reclaimer (salvage), a Carrack (exploration), and a Caterpillar (cargo) and I thought each of those were large. I didn’t know large until I took delivery of the Drake Ironclad on the PTU this morning.

The IC comes in two varieties: the standard cargo version, and the “assault” version. As you might imagine, the cargo version has a large cargo hold accessible through a front ramp as well as through a retractable ceiling.

The assault variant has a lot more guns, but can also R3 (refuel, rearm, repair) smaller ships that can land inside of the hangar.

I picked up the IC cargo edition at the end of last year, after having traded in most of my other, larger ships (like the Carrack). I thought it might make a really good mobile base, as I would be able to store cargo in the immense cargo hold, and also land it somewhere and just live life off the grid. As an added bonus, the IC has a detachable command module; when connected to the main body of the craft, the command module flies the ship. When detached, the main body stays put in space or on the ground, and module can fly away, like a metro-car.

As of this writing, the IC is available on the test server, but it’s got issues. For one, the command module that is attached to the IC main body is unusable. I entered, and immediately fell through the floor. The workaround is to spawn another command module, destroy the existing one, and the dock the singularly spawned module to the body. That’s insane, so I just left it in the hangar and ran around the inside.

However, I think the IC is just too damn big. Most of the ship is the cargo bay/flight deck, but the back 1/3 is where the living quarters, engineering, and airlock access areas are. There are little nooks throughout, such as a command center that overlooks the cargo bay/flight deck, and an operations center where players can man the external turrets (there is a turret that’s inside the bay, useful to repel anyone who tries to board the ship to steal cargo).

Even though that doesn’t sound like much, it is a Drake ship. Drake ships don’t care for aesthetics or basic design principles. They make their ships work, and that’s good enough. One result of this ethos is that I can never find my way through a Drake ship. Hallways are placed everywhere, often seeming like they were set down as an afterthought to correct a mistake no one wants to spend time fixing. When walking through the IC I went up and down stairs, ladders, and elevators. I went through dozens of doors. Many rooms are either dead-ends or have two or more entrances which all lead to the same place…or do they? And because of the size of the IC, I’d need to really know the layout like the back of my hand, and would have to expect anyone onboard with me to do the same in cases where, if we were flying cargo and came under attack, the crew would need to get to the turrets as quickly as possible, or to engineering, or elsewhere to fend off boarders. I can totally see a crew reenacting the scene from Spinal Tap where the band gets lost under their own stage, and I’m not exaggerating.

Obviously, this is not a soloable ship. A solo player could fly it, and use it, but not to it’s full extent and that’s true of a lot of large ships in Star Citizen. A lot of people would like to own ships like the IC, the Polaris, the Idris, the Javelin, or — gawd help us — the Odin, but to operate them effectively if at all requires a lot of hands. Some players are up and ready to just be crew; I’m not personally against it and I think it’s fun sometimes to just do one task like man a turret or load or unload cargo, but in a game where 20 people can all own massive sub- and capital ships, everyone needs to be the captain in order to justify their purchase.

Prior to my morning walk-through I had been contemplated CCUing the IC cargo to the IC assault for the small ship maintenance options, but I think I’m just going to melt it and re-acquire the Carrack. The Carrack is large, but I don’t feel that it’s prohibitively large. Right now, I have two friends whom I play with, and I think between the three of us, the Carrick is the right size for the kinds of things we like to do. It carries a “parasite craft” (which it can R3) and has room for either a small amount of cargo or at least decent sized ground vehicle. Since the Carrack has yet to receive it’s “gold standard” pass — as an exploration ship, it’s waiting for exploration gameplay I assume, before CIG gets around to revisiting the design — there might also be opportunities for previous promises of modularity to be introduced, making the Carrack configurable for different roles.

I will melt the IC and see what my buyback queue looks like. I should have Carrack in there, but I would also like to reacquire the Pisces (medical version if at all possible) and the Ursa (medical or standard, if possible). I once owned a combo pack of all three, and that would be acceptable, if it’s less expensive than re-acquiring all three individually. Worst case scenario, the Drake “DefenseCon” starts on Thursday, so the opportunity to acquire a fresh Carrack and side-dishes will be made available to me.