“The most important thing is to have a connection to your ride. Your ship needs to be your friend, your family. Why would you ever trust your life to something you didn’t love?” - Kyle Valentino, founder of the Lonely Hearts Dragonfly Club
Drake Dragonfly - Concept Art Greetings Citizens, Another Concept Sale, another Question & Answer session. Since last Friday, we’ve been collecting questions from the dedicated Q&A post here and today our designers working on the ship will answer 10 questions for the community. Tune back in this Friday to see the answers to 10 more questions.
Drake Interplanetary is fond of claiming that they build starships for the way you live; with the Dragonfly, they’ve gone an extra step and built a new way of life around the ship itself. Highly compact for easy storage anywhere and capable of traversing both space and ground, the 2947 Dragonfly changes the way we think about ships.
Special thanks to Matt Sherman for taking the time to answer these questions for us.
Question & Answer How does the Dragonfly compare in speed to other ships? Right now, we’re currently working off an SCM speed of 180 with a max cruise speed of 300. We want the acceleration to these speeds to be a bigger hallmark for the Dragonfly, so while it should overtake most freighters, it won’t be outrunning the fastest of the fast.
Will the Dragonfly be able to “fly” in a planetary atmosphere to some degree even though it can’t transition to space, or will it be landlocked to its ground mode while on a planet? The Dragonfly would not be capable of atmospheric flight. When on a planet’s surface, it would just be operating in its ground mode.
Since the Dragonfly hovers above the ground, can it also hover over water and other terrestrial surfaces? Yes, we’re definitely targeting the ground mode for the Dragonfly to be capable of all-terrain travel. You’ll still want to be mindful of where it’s flying, since while bodies of water should be fine, more hazardous substances could still cause environmental impacts to performance.
The Dragonfly will have a cargo capacity of 1 SCU. Would it be possible to increase this capacity by removing the second seat in order to add another cargo compartment? The 1 SCU value is including the use of the second seat as an additional saddlebag. The cargo allowances would break up like this: 2- 0.25 SCU containers mounted on the rear-sides of the Dragonfly.
1- Optional 0.5 SCU container taking the rear-seat.
Can the passenger also face forwards? No, the rider would always be seated back to back with the pilot.
Can we change the two size 1 guns of the Dragonfly for a size 2 weapon? No, the weapon mounts cannot be changed. You can still swap out the weapons, and the Dragonfly has built in ammo capacity if you’re running ballistic weapons.
Will the Dragonfly have a magnetic locking system allowing it the ability to latch onto any ship it wants and piggyback? No, the Grav-Levs are not magnetic devices and would not allow the ship to piggyback to the outer hull of another ship.
Will we be able to operate them in the hangar when they are flight ready? This is still being determined as we haven’t locked down if the Dragonfly will be operating off a ship-port from a hangar or the vehicle-ports. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, but it’s not something we can fully commit to happening at this time.
Could we have more information on which ships can and which ships can’t launch Dragonflies? These will be listed as 3 main groups, Ships we will confirm the ability to deploy the Dragonfly from, ships we’ll confirm you cannot deploy one, and ships that are plausible/possible to deploy from, but that we cannot fully commit to the functionality at this time.
Ships you will be able to deploy at least 1 Dragonfly from:
Caterpillar, Freelancer, Constellation, Starfarer, Retaliator (when Cargo modules installed), Idris-P/M.
Ships you will not be able to deploy a Dragonfly from:
Avenger, Reliant
Ships whose capacity could fit, but ability to deploy a Dragonfly is still undetermined (NOTE: Any ship which has not started a full build-out will be listed here, even if they have existing snub or hangar capacity.):
Cutlass, Carrack, Merchantman, Reclaimer, Orion, 890 Jump, Hull-C/D/E, Crucible, Javelin, Endeavor, Genesis.
The ship mass is currently equal to the P-52 Merlin, weighing in at 6000 kg. Is this accurate? No, that was older information from the initial concepts of the Dragonfly, with the current projected weight coming in around 1000kg. For reference on how much the Dragonfly shrank during concept, the image to the right shows an earlier version of the Dragonfly which was being worked on.
This larger version was easily 3 times the size of where the Dragonfly ended up, and was the original reference for the 6000kg weight. Sorry for any confusion that may have caused.