Bonus Content Disc/Technology: Normandy - Exterior

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Technology of Mass Effect: Normandy - Exterior" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

Image 1

Derek Watts: So, this drawing is actually in another section of the gallery. This was one of the early designs for the Normandy. This was thinking the ship was maybe just a crew of maybe ten guys; actually, maybe just your party members. It had a small cockpit, a small interior, very flat, kind of these plates that went down... Those engines on either side would rotate, so, as it landed, they would face downwards to slow the ship down and then rotate backwards during forward thrust. The designers at this point said "we need a larger ship" so we started to expand the size of this.

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Derek Watts: So, this was starting to get fairly close to the final design. One thing we liked about this was it was something that looked like it could have been larger. It had a large cockpit, had a nice unique design to it, the way the engines were... We wanted something that could actually move around, like, give animation to the wings. The ship wouldn't just be static, it would actually-- the wings would move either out left or right. The main cockpit area and the fuselage behind that was almost separate from the wings, it could move around also.

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Derek Watts: So, after taking that design, we just did some quick line drawings, started to clean it up, just modifying the look of it. So, you can see we started to remove some of the organic feel to it, start to straighten out some of the lines, do a bit of cockpit studies up at the front.

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Derek Watts: Again this is another quick drawing, a little bit different. This one had the same cockpit as the first drawing, but playing around with some of the engine ideas.

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Derek Watts: Now this was one that we had painted up, we were thinking this was getting pretty close. This had a lot of stuff that we liked in it: the way the wings were braced in there, it had a good size to it, an aggressive cockpit... We liked those wings that faced out forward. So, we usually sat on this design for a couple of months, and then we'll usually come back to it, see if we still like it; start to get some feedback from people, send it around to maybe 15-20 people, get some critiques on it.

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Derek Watts: So, one thing we did afterwards was took it into Photoshop, quickly painted over it, just straightening out some of those lines... Really getting a good feel for how we wanted these arcs, these 45-degree angles. Some of the engine detail is starting to come in now. You see those little discs on there, that's where the engine would rotate around. You can actually start to see the first drawings of how the blades go in behind the boosters with that solid piece. That was starting to become a kind of feature of the human ships in Mass Effect. And just a bit of studying with the cockpit, how that would look.

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Derek Watts: So, this is getting pretty close to the final design. We've got our cockpit the way we want, we have those nice long arcs through the whole fuselage. Some other lines coming through there, trying to really figure out how the panels would look. Put a bit of a wing on the back. A little bit of a communication... navigational tower there, just for something to break up that line. We're starting to get our engines down the way we want it. And then just the intakes too at the front, these would be reverse thrusters. As it would come in, you'd have the engine slow down the ship. And then also those nice little wings at the front of the cockpit, going to carry that arc right through the front; also gives it a nice aggressive look.

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Derek Watts: This was the final design for it. This was the last drawing we had done. At that point, we had some other writing on there. I threw SST on there, just to put something on there. We ended up removing that and just called the Normandy the SR-1. We played around with a few other names on there, but it needed some kind of type on there, just to make it work with the design. So, we've got our intakes all pretty well finalized. Our engines, the cockpit is the way we want it. We eventually changed the color from... at this point it was orange and black. We eventually went with red and black to match the N7 armor.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept. We just took one of the quick drawings, spread out the wings and showed; this is an extreme view of how much motion we could get out of the wings, and the booster, the blades on the engines pointing down... The animators had that much freedom to make this thing work and move around. We wanted to give the ship life, and this really helped out with that.