I reckon it's time for our first dev update of 2024!
This week I've pretty much exclusively been working on the new ship model, with a lot of effort being put into measuring rooms and nailing down the exact location of various features. The biggest challenge by far is making sure the ship has every room/facility it could possibly need, and then making sure it all fits properly within the limits of the hull. That, and routing the engineering foot traffic around crew habitation areas to keep them properly separated.
Sometimes I forget that I'm designing an entire starship from the ground up, and the enormity of that challenge is never more obvious than when you start thinking about the amount of work that goes into designing a real-world aircraft carrier or cruise liner. There are so many little things you have to think about (and get right) in order for the vessel to be fit for purpose.
I think we're pretty much there though on the internal layout, so the next task is to refine/finalise the room boundaries, and then start laying out all the structural beams. I'm guessing at least another week before any of this gets into Unreal :)
