Something big

[Eternal_Freedom]

I hate to say it, but it doesn't look like a Dreadnought so much as...inspired by a Dreadnought is the best way I can think to put it.

[Crazedwraith]

it just needs some flight pods.

It's my new battlestar and it's some so far...

[Crossroads Inc.]

I hate to say it, but it doesn't look like a Dreadnought so much as...inspired by a Dreadnought is the best way I can think to put it.

You know, As much as I'd asked for a Dreadnaught, I really think this version is growing on me... Ansel has done amazing work and doing something "inspired by" vs a direct copy, I find it refreshing.
I am starting to think of it as a "Dreadnaught 2.0" Perhaps a newer, more compact and advanced model.

[fractalsponge1]

I hate to say it, but it doesn't look like a Dreadnought so much as...inspired by a Dreadnought is the best way I can think to put it.

You know, As much as I'd asked for a Dreadnaught, I really think this version is growing on me... Ansel has done amazing work and doing something "inspired by" vs a direct copy, I find it refreshing.
I am starting to think of it as a "Dreadnaught 2.0" Perhaps a newer, more compact and advanced model.

If you really need a backstory to bridge the old numbers with the new look, I'd suggest the following:

Old dread was slow, grossly inefficient with crew, and had a regiment worth of troops in the chin "cargo hold" area - ship would land and disgorge troops, since it didn't have much of a hangar. Imperial Navy is stuck with a huge number of the things, so they'd want to do something with them other than have them suck up scarce trained manpower. There are enormous numbers of Acclamators, so the troop role of the Dreadnaught is discounted. So, space exists to refit them into something worthwhile as a garrison/deterrent/heavy escort.

The blisters are largely external structures, so on refit, they get moved around a bit for some better all-round arcs, with some armor added as a dorsal mantlet, and the dockyard swaps 6 quad mediums for single 40-teraton HTL (a la ISDII). The cargo hold in the chin is stripped off, and replaced with a housing for heavy anti-ship warheads. That gives them some modicum of credibility when facing destroyers (lot more vs Clone Wars ships like the V-boats than an ISD, but you take what you can get with old hulls). Small box hangar added ventrally for a squadron of TIEs and not much else. Troop load drops to battalion, all for boarding/space action, which is more in line with a medium/heavy frigate (Vindicator, Strike, Kontos all have ~ battalion carriage). Can't do much with engines, but internally the ship gets the full Katana rig to reduce the crew to something reasonable like 2000 rather than the absurd old 16000 number. I'd hesitate to guess at exact cost effectiveness of the refit, but getting what amounts to a mini Victory I for the cost of a frigate doesn't seem like that bad a trade. As a pack, they'd still be less efficient than a single ISDII, but for the new design it'd be a lot closer than for the old.

[Patroklos]

If that's the backstory I'd drop the troops altogether as well as the squadron of TIEs. I see no space fore either. It carries a normal Naval Trooper self defense force and the small hanger is for foe a shuttle craft and a couple scout TIEs. Its a direct fire second line close support vessel for convoy defense. Maybe it can serve as a space superiority platform in the backwaters or the spoiler in conduction with an ISD.

Can you give us an internal volume measurement from the model?

[fractalsponge1]

If that's the backstory I'd drop the troops altogether as well as the squadron of TIEs. I see no space fore either. It carries a normal Naval Trooper self defense force and the small hanger is for foe a shuttle craft and a couple scout TIEs. Its a direct fire second line close support vessel for convoy defense. Maybe it can serve as a space superiority platform in the backwaters or the spoiler in conduction with an ISD.

Can you give us an internal volume measurement from the model?

The battalion is for self defense. Naval or Stormtroopers, but no vehicles, which are the real volume-killers. Quarters for troops alone are pretty trivially easy to come by for a SW-sized ship.

The TIE complement could vary a fair bit. Pack 12 TIE/ln wingtip to wingtip and you're really only looking at about ~4000 m3 total volume. The ventral hangar box is about 7e4 m3 total volume. Even subtract half for internal structure and that's a generous allotment for a single squadron's worth of storage, maintenance, plus a few shuttles, utility craft, and transports. It's easy to forget how large SW ships are, and how amazingly small their fighters (well, Imperial fighters) are.

I doubt it'd carry much in the way of scouts, though, since Dreadnaughts don't seem to be fast enough to be doing recon or hunter work. As pack boats or as heavy convoy escort you'd want some contribution to the light craft screen - launch and let them do their thing until the shooting stops, rather than be tied down as a mothership doing scout launch rotations. There are ships better suited to handle that task.

Total volume is on the order of 5e6 m3.

[fractalsponge1]

Commissioned piece.

I'm using the old McQuarrie and Cantwell concept designs and mixing in elements from the Venator, ISD, and existing Victory depictions.

The goals are:
1) It should bridge the Venator and the Devastator in appearance. I know the Venator didn't exist when the first VSDs were being drawn, but we have Venators now, so I think we should use parts of that design lineage since Victories were supposed to be contemporaries of the Venators
2) It should NOT look like an underfed ISD - this is one of my biggest gripes with the VSD depictions out there at the moment
3) The extra knobbly bits that were added to the basic star destroyer archetype should look integrated and *designed* to be there. I'm talking about the wings, the projecting box holding the bridge, and the stalks off the tower and such.

[Crossroads Inc.]

It has WINNINGS!!
+5 for coolness!
Loving it :3

[23 November 1939]

Commissioned piece.
[Snip]

Sounds promising, particularly moving the design away from ISD-with-fiddly-bits. Looking forward to more.

[Knife]

Eh, wings still look forced man, as does the extended bridge tower.

[Geforce]

Finally

but some small notes at the beginning

the sensor domes looks a little to big what do you think about that style? three domes are very nice

[Abacus]

He's going off the original drawings of the VSD, not the newest images, mixed with others. So there shouldn't be any direct correlation.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/books/art/anhvsd.jpg
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/books/egvv/vsd-eg2.gif

[fractalsponge1]

Light shuttle idea - basically a lot smaller than a Lambda but with roughly similar internal cabin capacity. Suitable for utility tasks and for deployment off smaller ships that cannot handle the very volume-intensive Lambda variants. Original basic layout from the following, with my own twist and obviously different detail work:

http://www.galacticempire.org/2013/04/s ... uttle.html




Also, VSD update:

[Crossroads Inc.]

Huzzah for more small craft!
Shuttles in particular are something it is good to see more of and, especially in the OST, we didn't really see very much of.
Love the "TIE Cockpit-ish look to it there ya got going on.
Quite nice!

[fractalsponge1]

Bridge update. The antennae are conceived as missile control aerials, just like they are on the refitted Dreadnaught.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Love the details on the the bridge!
Once again doing a wonderful job of making it stylistically unique and different from the standard "An ISD with Wings" that we got for so long in regard to the Victory.
the Victory-SD after all was supposedly made by a different company then the one that made the ISD, so seeing noticeable production differences is expected.

[Beersatron]

How big are those missiles? Can you put a fighter beside one, for scale?

[fractalsponge1]

A good deal bigger than fighters by volume.

Well that was quick - small shuttle is done, calling it Mu-class.

[Crossroads Inc.]

VERY nice! It looks very, fast Love the "Extra engine pods" on the top, the 'air intact' ducts? or whatever those are, look very cool as well...

The cockpit....Looks odd, I think it's just the "shine" of the glass on it.
Over all very nice for a quick small shuttle to add to the collection.

On another note.

For the Vic-Star.
The one you are working on I know is a big Missile ship with those huge beefy torpedo batteries in the wings.
I am curious if you plan on making an "All Gun" version of it as well?
I know traditionally there were the Vic-Stars Mk1 and Mk2. With one being a missile ship and the other being a dedicated gun platform.

[fractalsponge1]

I might make a Vic2 version at the end.

Haven't had much time for this lately, but here's another small section.

[fractalsponge1]

[evillejedi]

Interesting to take the Vicstar, I always felt the original star destroyer concept reference it was based on was too narrow to have a brim trench and that the bottom may actually be a bent kite/concave similar to how the Vengeance SSD is implied to be

On the dreadnaught refit. The overall ship design I like and it works as an imperial era refit. The engines especially I like, but the blisters feel wrong somehow.
My Fatnaught design was a different attempt to bring the ship into some level of parity and handwave some of the rationale of the republic. By widening the Beam of the ship and dedicating the entire bulbous volume before the engines as a cylindrical power reactor you can get a volume roughly 1/8 of an ISD reactor in there. This starts to put the ship in line with the 6:1 ratio from some of the novels (which is still way overpowered) I always imagined that the dreadnaughts were basically economical big sticks for Republic diplomacy that the Senate would approve. Each of the big blisters would house the emitting barrels of very heavy turbolasers that took up most of the internal area of the mid section of the ship. The Blisters would clamshell open and closed. Essentially closed would mean "I'm here to visit" Open would mean "We are negotiating"
The ship would normally face the target presenting a small cross section with almost no critical systems exposed at range and a heavily shielded and armored bow (not sure of the slope would matter for deflector shields, but it could be part of the integral design) The blisters stick out far enough that any range more than a few ship lengths long all of them could fire forward in an alpha strike. The other lasers and turbolasers were only meant to discourage flanking attacks by smaller ships and therefore didn't need to face forward. The ship would be screwed in any long lived or close range engagement and obviously with anything that significantly outmassed it, but a large field like the katana fleet would essentially be as devastating as a Republic era star cruiser/dreadnought at the initiation of hostilities, which was probably good enough for the vast majority of deployments and was much easier to justify thousands of smaller ships spread across republic space. It still does't explain the crew requirements, seriously when one of these ships pops it probably is like an overfed mosquito. Maybe the dreadnaughts were conceived of as a jobs program?

[Crossroads Inc.]

When it comes to 'Alpha Strike' I think that is one of the things Fractal got quite good.
This image better than any other shows how effective the guns on the "Imperial Refit" are.

[Patroklos]

Not really, since you are only seeing half of each blisters armament, the other is masked.

[fractalsponge1]

Not really, since you are only seeing half of each blisters armament, the other is masked.

Within the limits of the design remit (which is pretty underwhelming regarding gun arcs), all the HTL can point on. That's 80+% of the non-missile firepower going. The rest of the blisters are quad MTL, and are largely for broadside fire (and aft fire, though everything but 2 MTL turrets on very limited arcs is masked by the engine block dead aft).