View source for Thread:SpyTec/@comment-174.102.154.114-20150328012557

Following up to our little spat over the cutter. If you take a look in various game data files, you'll find references to the cutter in addition to references to the Imperial Fighter (labeled Empire Fighter), indicating that these are separate ships.

A notable example, pull up the Root.ovi file found within the game data files in it's installation directory. Mixed in within all the garbage, you'll find several readable text strings containing "cutter" that are similar to those of other playable ships. 

Another example, look at global.ovi. Here you'll find plenty of shipyard references for various ships. There's an entry for the cutter, similar to the entry for the vulture and other playable ships. I've noted entries for "trader", "cutter" "asp" "panther" "orca" "adder" "ferdelance" "belugaliner" "anaconda" "type6" "type7" "hauler" "type9" "viper" "python" "dolphin" "sidewinder" "cobramkiii" "vulture" "eagle" "federationdropship" 

Where the game data really shines though is in the localised data, so using UK.ovi as the example, you can find a reference to all the ships. Just search for them. This contains separate references to both cutter and empire_fighter, as well as being a good place to find references to more obscure unreleased ships like the diamondback and empire_liner, which don't appear many other places. What else is noatble, is while you can find all the ships listed in our current and upcoming, as well as non-playable ships, you find NO reference to concept only ships like "the hunter" and "krait".

These are all things you can see for yourself with a decent text editor and a little bit of searching. I like notepad++. Others on reddit have maybe had better success parsing the game data, but this is a quick and dirty way to see for yourself.<ac_metadata title="Cutter"> </ac_metadata>