that’s amazing
Mega necro post because now it’s 2017, and I got so buried in study that I had no time to develop lore of the company. I’ll get back to that later.
Instead, I’ll post a couple of sketches of draft interiors to shed a little bit of insight into the philosophy of the company design process.
The contrast between interior and exterior design at GG is somewhat paradoxical. Strop’s designs are generally flambouyant, dramatic, but generally a result of pushing a particular aerodynamic solution to the utmost limits of road legality. Thus GG is host to a plethora of shapes and forms that never made it past the clay stage, whittled down to the point where mockups are made, and only the rare few ever have an engine planted into it for actual engineering workup. Thus of the spectrum of drafts engendered in the stable, the models that actually make it to the light of day seem bizarrely unrelated and haphazard.
GG interiors, on the other hand, don’t share that same dramatic flair. This reflects the GG dogma that the only true sensation of speed is speed itself. Therefore there’s no need for excessively gaudy or sculpted works of art within the cabin, no need to generate any extraneous lines or impressions. They’re all distraction. That which is generated by the simple mission of a layout that allows the driver best control of their car at the limit would be more than sufficient.
In addition, much in the spirit of the true race cars, GG doesn’t want the interior to weigh down the rest of the car. So you get what you need, and nothing more. Initial GG cars were pretty much stripped out track racers, even more spartan than the likes of a Cup/Trophy/RS edition of a sports car. All you got was a (racing) steering wheel, bare metal pedals, a minimalistic LCD display, and a panel on your central console for all your switches. Oh, and a fire extinguisher and rollcage. But with an increasing emphasis on relevance, GG has conceded to softening the experience somewhat and at least putting stategic sound insulation and power windows.
The other thing that a GG cabin needs to do is be easily assembled for both RH and LH drive, as it aims to be ratified for sale in US, UK, Euro, Middle East, Chinese as well as Australian markets.
#[color=lime]Mercury[/color]
Mercury was first unveiled as a ‘proof of concept’ of GG in 2015. Featuring twin scrolls each the size of your head, the prototype was the first road legal car in the world to have a 2hp:1kg ratio. It even raced in a couple of exhibition events, fitted with an extreme GT aero package for maximum downforce. Needless to say it could barely manage two laps of Nordschleife before running out of fuel.
However, the true goal of Mercury was to make the ultimate hypercar, one that was capable of reaching 500km/h while retaining its world beating status on the track. As a number of reviews have pointed out, while it is capable of developing a fair amount of downforce thanks to active aero, it’s a far cry from the ridiculous all-out aero of earlier GG cars (because those were race cars). In fact, much like a fighter jet, without copious driving aid intervention, it would be entirely impossible to drive for anybody less than the most skilled of race drivers.
Thus the real aim of Mercury was to develop the most sophisticated integrated digital control system. The interior reflects this in a significant shift away from cluttered consoles and towards a digital flow. The major drawcard here, will be the projected customisable HUD, a UI that builds upon the ludicrous array of sensors that dot the car (and add nearly 100kg onto the prototype).
I’m not sold on the placement of a number of things (mainly the door speakers. Don’t think that will work), but the general impression is there. Because I don’t have time to colour things properly, the majority of the material in here is CF lightly lacquered so in fact you will see the crossweave, because Mercury spares little expense in achieving the lightest, stiffest, most durable chassis possible. Other than that, Mercury’s steering wheel is unique in that most of the driving related controls are on the wheel: lights, wipers, power and traction and slip profiles (and also overboost and DRS, but those require special overrides as they significantly reduce the life of the engine). And the display appears extremely minimalistic. The fun part is in that giant imposing dial that seems more complicated to operate than a BMW iDrive system. That’s the main digital drive control dial, and the big striped DANGER marking is a tradition harkening back to Mephisto. This is the dial that lets you adjust exactly how you want the car to behave, in terms of torque limitation, engine mapping, degree of slip tolerated in the tyres, how intrusive or not you want the torque vectoring to be, the aero behaviour etc. In this way you can then save these presets to a memory bank for a particular set of conditions or even a particular location (best done if you have the GG navigation and telemetry app), so when you drive in a particular location, you can then quickly change profiles for different sections of a course.
Here’s the annotated version of the above diagram:
and a very rough draft of what it might look like in action
While Mercury was initially hailed as a standard in hypercar design, Strop doesn’t consider it a success because as a road car it has to sacrifice too much in order to attain the mandate of 500km/h. Such a thing is only achieved in the most stringent of warranty-voiding conditions, which feels something akin to using the launch control in a GT-R and discovering Nissan doesn’t want to fix your clutch afterwards. Therefore, what Strop hopes to do next is make a car that will happily do 500km/h without having to cheat. But it’s going to take a very big engine. And an even more advanced body.
#[color=red]Lilith[/color]
This is the latest prototype in a series destined to be the GG Affordable Hypercar. The basic philosophy is: why bother paying an extra 50 grand for less comfort from prestige marques, when you can go way faster in a GG car for less? This is quite the shock in that budget is obviously not what you would associate GG for, and also quite the horror (as Wild German expressed), that you would make LaFerrari levels of performance available to even moderately wealthy people. But this is to be a cornerstone in GG’s mission to progressively transform the sector.
The project started off, again in 2015, with Salamander, GG’s limited take on the AWD hypercar. Signing a deal with GM (much to the disgust of several Ford fans here, but Hannah’s the boss and she was a Holden girl), they took 400 of the final batch of 3.6L Extra Features V6es and tuned it to its limits, to the tune of 800bhp. The car proved to still be very expensive (165k) due to its all CF construction, as GG hadn’t established any other manufacturing pipeline at the time, but as an experiment (and gamble), it worked well enough for stakeholders to direct the company to further pursue this line of thinking.
Fast forward a couple of years and a couple of friendly mergers and rescue deals, plus a logistics-heavy, design quiet year in 2016, and GG is ready to start looking into its aluminium manufacturing processes with a much more suitable contender, Lilith.
Once again, the interior shares a certain design language with other GG models in that it conveys business and minimalism. The unspoken GG rule is that you only need as many speakers as you have seats, so for a 2 seater, it’s 2 speakers. The speakers are mounted in the central column, too, which isn’t particularly superb for acoustics, but in a GG car, you’re expected to drive, not headbang like a dickhead.
Probably the biggest difference between this and Mercury’s control systems is that not nearly as much was invested in the complexity of customisation. As a more user-friendly car as opposed to one for oligarch race nuts, the interface is simpler. Instead of a separate projector as required for display purposes in Mercury, all the HUD here comes from the same source, directed through a refractive prism onto the windscreen. The main accessibility issue in Lilith remains that the seats are bucket and still very low in the cabin, and I forgot to draw in the frame handles that will allow you lever yourself out of the car. I guess this precludes people with bad arthritis from driving one 
Where previous prototype Ouroboros drew bemused reactions from the likes of Deskyx and titleguy1, Lilith was very positively reviewed by aLittleWhile, which gives us hope that this is the way forward, towards the ultimate goal, at least for this tier of car, to be our higher volume hyper performance eco-car.
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the exhaust tips look like a dick
Rest of the design is brilliant, I must say. The interior shots in specific are amazing.
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CANNOT UNSEE
you must have a tiny stud dick if that’s what it makes you see lolololololol
ok ok I will change their proportions slightly so that it looks less phallic. Or better yet I’ll refine it slightly 
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I aspire to be able to draw interiors like you do.
Also, so much lore! 
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We’re about to switch to Unreal, which means most likely we’ll have to make our cars from scratch. Before this, then, I’d like to share:
A Very Delayed Update
With some random tidbits.
First, there are a couple of outstanding stories that I started something like 2 years ago and never got around to finishing. Of these, the most important one is the story that chronicles the moment the company had a bit of an epiphany in their business model, which led to the idea of multiple tiers of car: the reasonably priced hypercar, the trackday lord hypercar, and the once in a generation world-altering rarer than a Trevita ultimate racing machine. But before this kind of focus, GG were a mishmash of anything and everything goes in the name of speed. Near the end of 2015, shortly after the conclusion of a joint project with Znopresk, which would go on to transform the company’s racing fortunes, a midnight spin in a tuned Rennen Kusanagi changed their perception of speed and driving.
@titleguy1 has been waiting literally 2 years for this story to be released, and sometime in the next couple of weeks, I plan to finish and post it, because without it, the GG story might actually feel a bit incomplete.
2016 was, as I said before, a very quiet year design wise. This is due to two things:
###Development of Mercury’s HUD and touchscreen interface
Previously mentioned, Mercury was GG’s first car to really incorporate Strop’s vision of a car that was so fast it needed to be piloted, more than it was driven. Thus the experience of sitting in a Mercury is more akin to sitting in a fighter jet cockpit. But to develop this required a lot of planning and effort beyond the simple stripped racing car “what interior?” cabins they were used to riding in. Thus delivery of the 25 Mercuries were delayed until 2017.
###Focus on the racing team with factory backing from Znopresk
Also previously mentioned, Znopresk backed the GG racing crew by filling their ranks with professional staff for the AMWEC. This was a full year-long season and, once again, the results added to our strong track record with a complete clean sweep of the GT class and overall classification. With this, our racing driver is now thus on a full-time roster in international touring car racing, and then some.
###Establishing an international network of performance tuning
We have now had victorious partnerships with major companies such as Dragotec, AMW and Znopresk, as well as shared development and tuning projects with Rennen, Boqliq, Kraft Haus Technik and more. Initially done as a means of survival, it is also a method of enrichment. Small companies are very mobile. But it’s difficult to stay small and be an international hub of research and development in auto manufacturing. So now that our processes are starting to become more established, it’s time to branch out further.
###Acquisition of remaining assets of Soltra and major infrastructure development
Soltra (formerly run by @UMGaming) was a family-oriented NZ based supercar hopeful that loved naturally aspirated V12s and aluminium. Was, because on Christmas Eve of 2015, their headquarters burned down, tragically killing two and destroying their prototypes and half their facilities. Having been on the cusp of releasing a new model, all of their plans literally went up in smoke, and since it was completely impossible to recoup their losses, Soltra went into receivership.
A month later, GG, starting to see the funds in the pipeline from the Znopresk investment, found they were in need of expanded facilities, and offered to buy out what remained of Soltra. Upon hearing of this offer, several of the Soltra staff additionally offered to move to Australia for a sea change. After drawing up some projections we eagerly accepted the proposal and welcomed a new wealth of knowledge and skill into the team.
###What does this mean?
Well, Strop took a crash course in Kiwi for one, since he’s now in charge of half a dozen of them. Over six months, a new warehouse was built and equipped so that GG now have separate buildings for their tuning projects, their manufacturing line and maintenance, AND their R&D. The original warehouse upstairs offices remain largely unchanged but now there’s a lot more floor space available so that development projects can be collaborated on in a open environment.
In terms of the design process, much of 2016 was a brainstorming phase, some of the results of which can be seen in certain cues in the design language of prototypes such as Ouroboros and Lilith. The mission was to try to incorporate as much racer as possible in the body while keeping it street legal (i.e. not a deadly scythe for pedestrian shins). That’s not to say that we didn’t toy with other ideas, like shitting all over the hot hatch wars by building an FF hyper hatch…
Anyway, the one thing I particularly wanted to reveal here was something I referenced nearly a year ago, a design study that took place after our collaboration with KHT, the Diabolica. In a similarly specced car, we rebuilt the body to showcase the new concepts of enhanced communication through more expressive LED lighting, and aerodynamic features to improve stability and road holding.
This prototype was never named as it was never intended for release. As much as we liked the styling and as far as we pushed the capabilities of the platform, it was clear if we wanted to build the ultimate ICE powered hypercar, we’d need something bigger, longer, and even sleeker with the space that allowed us to generate more ground effect for less drag.
Given the mounting pressure on fuel resource and our evolution from defiantly resisting progress to needing to embrace it to prepare for the future, the next project will likely be one of the last production petrol-powered hypercars, so we want to be damn sure it’ll be the final word in petrol power. This will come in the form of Jormungandr, and the benchmarks are as follows:
- Top speed 500km/h (without any dangerous overrides)
- Laps Nordschleife in 6:30
- “Reasonable” fuel consumption (around 13L/100km)
- Safety rating of at least 45
Needless to say there’s no fixed price, the aim would be to produce 25 units but it may not even be possible to achieve that. So it’ll be pre-orders only, and private offers, with a limit of one unit per buyer, and we keep chassis 00 and 01 for our… personal use.
###After that?
As a future-minded company, we must consider whether to commit to turn our attention to other forms of power, and which ones they ought to be. Unfortunately, given our country’s political reticence to embrace innovative energy policy, we may yet need to stick to ekeing out the maximum efficiencies out of ICE for a few more years yet.
###What’s going on now?
It appears that Kai and Strop went on holiday a little while back, on a Kinda Grand Tour. We expect they’ll be back, sans Toothless, armed with an epilogue to their adventure.
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kurwa mać can’t even pronounce that
At the car, I’m just… amazed.
I’m looking forward to a detailed description of Jormungandr… and when it arrives, a replacement for Toothless!
#VVL is OP
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Strop is OP
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Nah this thing has engineering time of 420, both engine and chassis.
Also 10.1L turbo V12 with VVL as German said. Over 2100bhp. 395 section rears because only the rear wheels are driven. And 15+ sliders on aero. I mean if you sink enough into something nearly anything is possible…
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Which body fits such monstrosity? With 395 mm rears it can’t be the modern (VMO’s) Lambo one…
OH.
I should have mentioned. I found the 335 rear limitation on that body ludicrous. So I altered the bones file, and informed vmo, who then said he’d reupload the new settings onto the workshop file. But I suspect he hasn’t.
So yeah, this is technically an altered .Lua car, sorry 
EDIT: will post the altered values of the bones when I get home.
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GRYPHON GEAR IS FAKE NEWS
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All this wouldn’t have happened if vmo had followed my recommendations to ratify my preferences 
you gotta admit, the body dimensions are pretty arbitrary right… Just saying, why a body like this doesn’t fit much wider tyres…
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We might as well have a locomotive mod for Automation fitting 5000hp engines and wheels the size of Ganymede
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Yes please, just so I can break the land speed record and say fuck you to the Devel 16
EDIT: eh, you know what, there’s not a huge difference in using 295/395 versus 265/335. It’s like 3 seconds around Green Hell, which I don’t care that much about. The handling’s almost the same. The fuel consumption is significantly improved. It’s like… balance is more important than sheer brute force 
Here’s the stats from the non-cheat version:
And here is the cheat version:
And here are the GH times (the green times are the cheat version):
So yeah it’s a touch slower but probably a hell of a lot easier to handle, cheaper to run… all these vital and important things to the ultra rich oil baron hypercar collector…
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“Top Speed: 500.6 km/h”
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