John Smedley of SOE tweets picture of a flying fleet carrier called a Bastion.

At the end of October, ZAM’s own Editor-in Chief Scott “Jarimor” Hawkes was able to sit down with Tramell Ray Isaac and Matt Higby for an interview about the then upcoming Planetside 2. Of the big topics discussed was the possible plan for player owned motherships and today we might have been given a glimpse of what these motherships might look like.

John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, tweeted this picture just minutes ago:

Higby in the interview gave some information on how these outfit-owned motherships might work:

“As an outfit you can spend a lot of resources on creating a mothership, set up defenses for it and you can field it on a continent, but if you do field it on a continent then it’s vulnerable to attack. You get other benefits for it, like you can do orbital strikes from it, you can drop pod anywhere on a map from it. [But] if their guys want to come crush it, they can. There’s a challenge there on how much time and effort goes into building up this sandcastle that someone can come kick over with very little effort.”

The only thing Smedley said with the picture was “People keep asking for galaxies to carry tanks. bah.” So whether this fleet carrier, called the Bastion for the Terran Republic, is some kind of guild base for Outfits or just a new kind of super-Galaxy ship is anyone’s guess. Either way, I want one.

[UPDATE] We reached out to SOE who responded that the Bastion is a concept only. The team is looking carefully at vehicle carriers and they may go with a smaller design than the depicted ship.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams