Imperial 528's Starship Thread [No 56k]

[Imperial528]

Dear god that thing is hideous from the front.

I find your lack of taste disturbing...[/snark]

Joking aside, I have recently made a sort of air-space interceptor. It's not terribly detailed, but then greebles have a tendency to burn up in reentry. Here it is:

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If you're wondering where the cockpit is, it's buried inside of it, about near the back of the scramjet intakes. Also, I have this neat pic of a bunch of these in fighter bays on the Andromeda. I had to re-size the bays though, since the fighter ended up have about the same wingspan of a 747, and about twice the length.

[KhorneFlakes]

I like the fighter. Simplistic, but nice looking enough and gets the job done.

[Number Theoretic]

Me too. It has a nice shape and one can imagine seeing it both in atmospheres and space. Don't worry if it gets too big, though. Space fighters that are bigger than air fighters do make sense, because of the longer ranges required in space.

Say, have you considered making a robotic warship (fighter, drone or bigger, perhaps an unmanned frigate)? Or a ship that essentially is a BFG with a drive attached to it?

[Imperial528]

I have toyed with the idea, although really most of my designs could be computer-controlled anyway, both from an in and out of universe perspective. (This includes large capital ships, although they are most effective with a full crew.)

At the moment I am working on a bomber-type spaceplane to go with the fighter, and then a troop transport/landing craft.

[Number Theoretic]

Quick question on your design methodogy, just out of curiosity: Do you make every design from scratch or do you sometimes reuse parts from older designs, for example engine exhaust nozzles, antennas, turrets etc.?

[Imperial528]

I have reused components sometimes, but usually every design is from scratch. However I tend to try and make them seem to be the same style.

[Imperial528]

After consulting with Purple on the design of the interceptor, I have revised it. Personally I think it is a vast improvement:

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I am now working on animating it.

[Imperial528]

Found a Bezier curve creation tool for Sketchup, installed it, made this:

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When I get the time I plan to move it over to max and try some rendering.

[Imperial528]

This is a concept I am working on, and I have run out of ideas. I have a feeling that the center hull needs a bit more to it but I can't figure out what:

[Number Theoretic]

Your latest design has an unsusal arrangement of turrets, but i like it. The only thing missing, i'd say, is perhaps some antennas or maybe radiator fins at the engine block.

As for the bezier experiment, i'd suggest combining it with conventional shapes. Perhaps this can lead to some elegant engine nacelles.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That latest design looks very similar to the Hiigaran Vortex battleship from the HW2 Complex mod. The shape, the engines, the turret arrangement, all very much the same.

[Imperial528]

I was inspired by the shape of the Vortex, actually. Although I have a much better gun arrangement than the Vortex, since my guns don't interfere with each other as much as the Vortex's guns do.

Although my engine design is significantly different than the Vortex's.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I thought it was based on the Vortex. At any rate, it's a rather good drawing, although I would be interested to see some other views of it.

Your ship does have the advantage of not having a bloody great hanger bay through the middle of the main hull.

[Imperial528]

Well, at the sides those are hangar entrances and the hangar itself is rather large. Like Hiigaran ships, its hangar entrances are largely inert pieces of structure. Unlike Hiigaran ones though, they are not gaping huge maws that just invite a bomb.

When I can I will post some shots from different angles.

[Number Theoretic]

Iain Banks' "Surface Detail" features a Culture warship which can split itself up into "sub-ships" or "shiplets". Have you experimented with this idea?

[Imperial528]

Not beyond things like bridge ejection, but your comment has given me an idea for such a design.

[Imperial528]

Well, I have a few other designs kicking around or sitting on the backburner at the moment, however I hit a wall on them so I decided to texture what I have decided to call the Salvation-class.

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The two turrets at the front replaced the spinal beam weapon, as you can see, but they are also beam weapons.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Very nice. I love this design.

[Imperial528]

Today I had a sudden moment of inspiration. So I made a hard sci-fi dreadnought-type ship:



I changed the color to gray and turned off edges because otherwise it would be nigh-impossibly to see, due to the sheer amount of lines.

[Imperial528]

Well, now it is finished, textured, and rendered. Behold, 2.141 miles of unrivaled power!

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's incredible.

[Imperial528]

Thank you. At the moment I am working on doing the math for it (M/AM consumption per engine, force of acceleration, power generation and weapons output.) I'm also going to animate it firing its main weapon and doing things like acceleration burns and maneuvering.

[KhorneFlakes]

Lovely ship. You've really improved. Now if I had the restraint to tolerate blender's annoying stretchyness when it comes to modeling stuff...

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Hi there dude. Thought you would like to know that I started making a little animation showing off a couple of models I made based on the old 80's space trading game, Elite. The Cobra MkIII ship from the game drops out of hyperspace near a planet, then flies in and docks with the classic Elite space station. The final product will probably be about 3 or 4 minutes long. Here's a taster of a couple of scenes spliced together...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV5B9NmBFig

I thought I'd spice it up by having the little trading ship fly past some ships on the way in to the planet, so I made a Python and a couple of other simple Elite ships. What i really wanted to do though, was to have it fly past a couple of improbably huge spaceships or battleships as well, just to get a Star Wars style flypast. The first one I thought of was the Warlord of yours, a version of which I host on my model website. I haven't animated the scene yet, I plan to have it fly past 2 of them and I spent an hour last night sticking about 40 lights on it to give it scale, but I did render a still to test the look. Here it is...



I just dropped by to let you know, and now I see you're really starting to kick ass with the models. If you have any you think are worth sharing with the world, drop me a line and I'll host a couple on my website for folks to download and use in their own animations and pictures. I trawled Deviant Art the other day and the models turn up in quite a few peoples work.

[salm]

Hi there dude. Thought you would like to know that I started making a little animation showing off a couple of models I made based on the old 80's space trading game, Elite. The Cobra MkIII ship from the game drops out of hyperspace near a planet, then flies in and docks with the classic Elite space station. The final product will probably be about 3 or 4 minutes long. Here's a taster of a couple of scenes spliced together...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV5B9NmBFig

Looks pretty cool.
After the second scene where you fly around the small ship you cut to a different view in which you see the small ship from further away moving towards the large ship.
It looks like the camera is starting to rotate just at the moment you cut into this scene. I mean the animation of the camera is probably set to fade in. It would probably look better if the rotation was set to linear. Kind of like you were not cutting to the beginning of the camara roation but into the middle of it where the camera allready has reached its maximum rotation speed.