Why on earth would the artists need to do that? I doubt they need to start from scratch on any of the existing ships.
I would have asked the same thing about the Avenger and Cutlass, and yet from the weekly Around the Verse episodes I get the impression that they've gone back to the drawing board to some extent on both of those ships.
It wouldn't be the first time they've redone existing ships. Chris Roberts had CGBot build the Hornet, Scythe and Bengal carrier during 2012 for the proof-of-concept video in the Kickstarter. Then he scrapped all of that work in early 2013 and rebuilt the Hornet and Scythe "to make the detail level match the new ships" (the Aurora, 300i, Freelancer and Constellation).
They had to basically rebuild all of those ships again at the end of 2013 and the first half of 2014 to add damage states and switch to PBR. (Same for the hangars — totally redesigned and rebuilt in 2014 to add PBR and the "room system" they came up with.)
And you want them to go back to that same handful of ships
again to add detail to them? I'd rather they not. They're good enough. They need to keep plodding along or else they'll never finish the dozens and dozens of ships planned for the game.
Even though it seems like they
are going back to the same half-dozen damn ships to add "modularity" because nothing is good enough, I guess. It's frustrating to watch.
