Bonus Content Disc/Technology: Space Vehicles - Turian

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

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Derek Watts: So, in the game, we have the turians. They're one of your party members, a very important race in the game. Again, they will also need ships. We weren't too sure how many ships they would need. I mean, we asked for fighters, cruisers, dreadnoughts... Maybe they'll need shuttles. Maybe they'll need other sized vehicles. So, we'll quickly draw a few of these up, and as the game gets further and further along in design and writing, we'll actually find out exactly what they need. So, these are some quick drawings of maybe what a turian ship might look like. We're thinking maybe for these ones, there'd be larger plates that were actually attached on the main body, maybe as more protective shielding on there, almost like a tank, how they put plates along the side or on the top to deflect bullets or absorb some of the impact. At this point when we were designing them, we knew the turians as a military race, so maybe they had concentrated more on their ships for this kind of purpose.

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Derek Watts: This was a concept maybe done up for something a bit larger, like a dreadnought. The cockpit is up at the front, just above the center part. You can kind of see that zigzag, that would be where the cockpit is. Then, it has these large vertical sections behind. Maybe if we took this design further along, there would be cannons up on top of those, and then a large body almost made of plates that go back to the engine. Maybe these plates, again, absorb some of the impact as they got damaged. The main body was in behind, so they weren't that important. It would just absorb some of the shells.

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Derek Watts: This design was done up. The cockpit is actually in further towards the back, just above the middle section. You can kind of see that black area, it has these large blades further behind, again, with the sheet metal, and then maybe the mass relay-- the main mass driver. The mass driver would be the large cannon that would fire at the front of that, so it would be embedded behind all this plating to protect it.

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Derek Watts: This is another ship design, almost like this hump in it that goes to this long back section. The engines were on either side of that hump, and then the cockpit right at the front. Maybe that hump section was... the turians had larger ground vehicles that could maybe be pulled up into that and then pulled off the ground. So, maybe this is almost like a transport vehicle for ground combat; fly in, drop off something, and then fly off. These weren't really written in the stories, but we were exploring some of these designs at this point.

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Derek Watts: Again, another quick turian design, playing around with some of those vertical areas, the paneling... Not much to talk about on this one.

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Derek Watts: This one here, we started to get an idea of maybe some wings kind of coming out of the turian ship. It would be too vertical, too horizontal, before it would be almost like a giant wedge going through space. So, we decided to put more wings on here, play around with the cockpit, but some of these elements we ended up taking to the final one.

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Derek Watts: So, this is the final design for the turian cruiser. You can see how those plates move off to the center section to wings at the back. It had these two large wings on either side that could fold up and move out during combat. It has the large protective plates along the side of the ship that could absorb some of the impact. Cockpit's at the front, those two cockpit areas, and then a hole down the middle for where the mass driver would fire its main shells, and the engines also had these protective plates on them too.

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Derek Watts: This is a design done up for the turian fighter. It had four engines, very vertical. It looked almost like a giant sheet of protective metal with a small cockpit on it.

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Derek Watts: This is the final design for the turian fighter. It had the small wings kind of at the back where the writing on would stay tight to the body, and maybe as it went into atmospheres, it would fold out to kind of slow it down, give it more stability. The cannons would be somewhere on the front; we really didn't figure out where they were going to be. We just designed this one, built a really small model for it. They ended up just using a very small version of this for cinematics, but we might use this later on in the games, further in the series. And then that rectangle at the back, kind of just above the wings, was the engine for this. It kind of has a nice feeling, almost like the turian head. You can kind of see some of the elements working in with that, how the turian head has that large bone structure on the back that moves to the back as a point.