It seems the Hornet brochure, variants, and commercial are doomed to never be released  ;).  With a most recent scheduled release date of today for the Hornet goodies, a lot of folks spent a good amount of time hitting F5 on the RSI page, hoping to get the long awaited Hornet information.
Instead, at about 7:30 PM (CDT), we got a post from Ben Lesnick letting us know the Hornet goodies would be delayed till Tuesday of next week, as they’re still not finished. Â As consolation, he told us we would still get something to look at tonight. Â That something, has turned out to be the revised Aurora brochure, along with a bit of the story as to what is holding up the Hornet this time:
Last week, we announced that the final Hornet commercial, brochure and patch would be available on Friday. As that deadline approaches, we have run into some issues and need more time to get it right. The Hornet is intended to be the first of the ships that fulfill the final delivery version: you watch the commercial and see the ship in action, you read the details and learn about the variants in the brochure and then you can check them out in the engine in the hangar.
We haven’t done this with the Aurora or the 300 Series yet; the Hornet is going to be the first time it happens and we are going to make sure it sets the standard for all future ship reveals. We could push one or two parts of the process tonight, but we can’t make the whole thing without working into the weekend. As you know, the team volunteered to work through the weekend for last week’s patch. I am not comfortable asking them to do that a second week in a row. Because of this I’ve decided to give the team Monday to finish up the loose ends on Monday, which means we will push out the full Hornet launch on Tuesday morning.
The brochure is very well put together, it includes some blueprints showing some hard point information, several pages of stats/artwork (including some lore information regarding various components like the engine, and shield generator. Â My favorite page, is the ‘family tree’ page that gives us a thumbnail image for all the variants, as well as all the vital stats for each one:
It’s definitely enough to hold me over till the Hornet goodies on Tuesday, but, I don’t think it will calm everyone (just because the Hornet has been delayed as much as it has).
One unexpected bonus of this, CIG appears to be learning from their previous communication SNAFUs. Â Ben notified chat roll, and followed up with a confirmation post later on the forums. Â Ideally, the original announcement of ‘not today’ would have been made on the forums, since that’s visible to the entire playerbase, and chat roll is a 3rd party system that only supports a super small subset of players (max 500). Â Still, this is an improvement over what we’ve gotten in the past, so that’s a good thing.