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Banu Merchantman: What we know and what we think
Discussion
Today at 02:07
Banu Merchantman – What we know
As of now, we now know the cargo is sitting at 2800 SCU in a bottom-positioned cargo hold with xi’an hover-tech elevators to access from outside of the vehicle and allow loading/unloading
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Interplay with a Banu Defender in the form of a front-positioned hangar (Due to Defender size, should fit the majortiy of small fighters you might decide to pair with it)
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Big Booms! Size 8 dual front cannons, appear to be similar in design to the singe cannons on the banu defender, along with a manned dual size 5 turret accessible from the bridge that appears to be weapons of a similar design.
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Big Zooms! A very large engine. Not really a whole lot to say aside from just...look at it!
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4 automated point defense turrets designed to intercept missiles and other incoming arms. These turrets take the form of size 1 weapons attached to the top and bottom of the craft. It is unknown whether these will function based on a pre-installed computer blade or on their own. The two top-mounted ones are visible in the above picture featuring the top-mounted turret
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The ‘spike’ has been clarified to be a dual function fuel scoop and entryway to the market. Current plan is to allow it to open up into stairs, flanked on either side with a series of holo-projectors to allow visitors to see goods on sale in the shops within.
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The market will contain 8 stores separated into 2 floors, with 4 on each floor. It is as of yet unknown whether the stores will share cargo capacity with the main hold or have their own inbuilt store-rooms (and thus, further boosting the total cargo capacity of the ship as a whole)
The center of the marketplace features a large central holo-projector that is controllable by the ship owner to display advertising or other content.
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The ship will fit into the largest size hangar (XL) but only barely due to it’s height and width. To accomplish this, the wings will collapse or fold inwards in some manner as with them extended, she ship could not fit within any standard hangar sizes. This is the same hangar size required for the Reclaimer, the Idris, the Kraken, and the 890. The ship also features a docking collar to link to stations and other facilities that may not have a hangar of the size needed to land. The docking collar will feature a light system that changes colors based on the safety/atmosphere status on the other side to allow you to know before opening the door whether a seal has been achieved yet or not
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The conference room has been retained, though the location has changed slightly, it has grown in size due to the overall growth of the ship, as well as a series of guest rooms for use by visitors during long negotiations, separate from the standard crew quarters. The ship is also confirmed to contain a kitchen of its own, a medbay, and a meditation garden as well as a dedicated engineering bay for servicing it’s rather large engines.
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Speculation
Driftwood Badger made a rather interesting post regarding what we can surmise from the newly increased size based on the multitude of pictures we now have of the redesigned merchantman, by using the size of the defender, the cargo containers, and the cyclone, coming to a new size of around 240M long Multiple other users in the thread have corroborated with their own measurements and math and most are coming to the same area, between 230 and 250. I highly suggest reading the thread on your own, but from what I can tell, most of the math checks out. Funnily enough, this brings it fairly close to the size of the MM in the concept art released at the defender concept sale, as calculated by user Narcto.
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https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spec ... be-is-240m )
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Price Increase
With the new functionality and size in mind, we are very likely to see at least 1, probably 2 more price increases for the merchantman, and likely some fairly significant jumps at that. I personally would probably guess it will approach the 900-1000 range, just due to the capacity and size as well as the alien tax, with an intermediate jump the next time it goes on sale and a final increase as it reaches flight-ready status. This is purely my own speculation but is based on other ships in it’s size category and function, as well as the ship’s overall popularity.
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When will we see it
We now know that the ship is in active development and has been since the beginning of the year. The progress tracker shows the concept art team likely wrapped up in august of this year and the vehicle content team should be finishing up in june of 2022. With this in mind, I’d expect we will probably be getting a flyable ship at around this time next year, allowing the content team ample time to finish up and test as well as put on the final polish.
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https://robertsspaceindustries.com/road ... coopr3uw8f )
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This is all I’ve managed to pull together, there is likely more information out there that I haven’t stumbled on or simply forgot, but feel free to add your own additions below or let me know if you have a different takeaway.