One of the challenges the writers faced was scaling down their ideas to make them feasible for production. Cuse said that he let such ideas flourish because of his relative inexperience with writing for television series. An example given by the writers was Boam's idea for a full-sized "pirate ship on wheels". The writers quickly realized they needed to scale the idea down to something the production designers could create. They settled on putting a full pirate crew on a stagecoach with cannons. Kern said it was better to "shoot past the mark, and come back to it, rather than start below it". He elaborated on this, saying, "if you envision the 40-foot galleon and go back from that, you'll always end up with more than if you start out with a pirate on a horse."