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Kelpie

"She's a relic of old Earth's hubris - back when our great grandfathers thought we'd spread out amongst the stars. But... Good thing about the third rock's antiques is they built 'em to last." - Ferrous Vaughn, chief shipwright, Jovian Shipyards.


Overview:
Named for the shape-shifting horse spirit of Scottish mythology, the Kelpie was originally designed on Earth as an icecracker, back when the scientists there expected deeper bands of ice in its oceans. When the first colonists discovered differently, the boats were mothballed and forgotten about until scavengers discovered them years later. They have since been repurposed as exploratory salvage vessels, with their robust energy systems and dense bulkheads proving an asset in Europa's hostile waters. The Kelpie may not be the fastest submarine in the sea, but she's reliable and, more importantly, dangerous.


Design Focus:
The Kelpie was designed to look and feel like a vanilla submarine, though one with some fun features and quality-of-life improvements. The three major themes I focused on were passive utility, balance for a start-to-finish campaign, and aesthetics.

Passive Utility: Making the submarine feel useful and valuable without cramming a thousand turrets on it.
-Features an easy-to-navigate floorplan, with compartments designed around how crews utilize subs.
-Weapons:
-4 hardpoints, with wide firing arcs. The rear hardpoints are built on small turret extensions, improving coverage.
-Top hardpoints are two coilguns; bottom-left hardpoint is a chaingun; bottom-right is empty at start.
-The firing arcs provide excellent coverage, but can risk hitting the hull if gunners aren't careful.
-Energy Systems:
-Junction box wiring is balanced to minimize degradation over time, but can maintain power if a box breaks.
-Auxiliary batteries can provide short-bursts of power to the ship, but can't keep up with running every system.
-The fabricators are connected to a power regulation battery to help reduce power spikes.
-A multi-point searchlight system on the command deck, allowing its user to click to switch between them.
-Each searchlight turn on or off depending on whether it's active.
-Each fabricator is linked to a corresponding storage cabinet for convenient construction.
-Befitting the salvager theme, a legacy deconstructor and storage rack are built into the airlock.
-Doors and hatches on the ship are designed in such a way that they remain open until flooding, in which they automatically close (Still working out a couple of kinks).

Balance: The Kelpie is designed with some weaknesses to keep players on their toes, but with enough strengths to carry a crew through the game. In all, it's meant to feel like a vanilla sub.

Aesthetics: I tried to strike a tone of a boat that's comfortable to live in, feels cool, and isn't the cramped mess of corridors and containers encountered in many custom submarines. From the enclosed reactor compartment, clean medbay, holographic combat information center, all the way to engineer's lounge, crew quarters, and even lighting, I wanted the boat to feel fun to play around in. I took inspirations from the Typhon 2, Orca, Winterhalter, Iroh, and one really cool custom sub I encountered that felt like the ship from Alien.

Captain's Treasures:
-Captaining can be a pain, and the class isn't particularly powerful. So, in the captain's cabinet on the command deck, you'll find a variety of goodies. This includes some high-quality weapons and tools, along with various medals. Feel free to remove them; they're meant to help catch up the numerous players that join up in public games and make captaining feel a little less onerous.

To-do:
-Playing around with the battery balance to ensure usefulness without allowing them to replace the reactor.
-Fiddling with the door wiring to make them easier to open during flooding.