|
MikeJF posted:
Yeah, Star Trek is a stand out in the realm of Sci-Fi because in comparison to most other franchises their ships are absolutely tiny. You have to get into the behemoths like the TNG Romulan Warbird, the Negh'Var, the Dominion Battleship and the Borg Cube before you're really playing in nearly the same league as Star Wars. edit: Ah yes, the legendary Poindexter snipe
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 08:55 |
|
|
Zorak of Michigan posted:I spent way too much of my high school years playing the FASA Star Trek board game and collecting every single ship recognition manual they had. They only had the exterior tri-views but they put some real thought into trying to make up roles for the various ships and explain the history of the various races' design practices. I'm nostalgic enough that I kind of want to go re-buy them but pragmatic enough to know that I'd also need to buy a new set of rules (so I could understand the stats) and before I knew it, I'd be $200 into materials for a game I have no desire to ever play again. Mmm. FASA did a few interior ship plans - the Enterprise was based on the Franz Joseph plans, the Klingon ship on the Mantell plans, and the Regula they made up themselves. I have the Joseph and Mantell and Regula in... okay, so for my lockdown I've been wiling away my spare time building a thing to let people scan in deck plans and arrange them in 3D so people can browse around them in a way that Cobra kinda wants to, and if they want, annotate and add extra detail and callouts. It's not ready yet but it's in progress!    turbolifts!  I was mainly doing it because there are an absurd number of deckplans fans have made over the years and they deserve to be able to view them cool, but I'm told it'll be great for Trek RPG players so I'm eventually hoping to add extra tools for that too. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Apr 19, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:43
|
|
|
For your next trick, peddling crack outside of schoolhouses?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 04:54
|
|
|
I had to make do with this book:
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 05:31
|
|
|
Hispanic! At The Disco posted:I had to make do with this book: Daleks!
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 05:46
|
|
|
Star Trek ships are only small when compared to the absolute largest ships in other genres, and they don't really seem to have much of a range of sizes. Despite the Imperial behemoths, many ships in Star Wars are basically wrapped around the pilot in cramped quarters, and a lot of stories are built around ships the size of an apartment. With the big ships you get the same issue where it all dissolves into a bunch of details without context.  Although a lot of the time, a big portion of the ship gets dedicated to real big facilities that are easier to see and get a feel for, like how this thing is 60% hangar space, 20% power generation.  I feel like while a lot of Imperial ships like Star Destroyers fit into the same vagueness that Star Trek has of sound stages that fit somewhere on a massive behemoth, the Rebel ships are particularly good at having designs that have to fit in with humans or have to fit in a shot with other human figures, giving you some scale, along with designs that are distinct enough to really inform what their interiors would be like.  I like all the way in the corner there's a real cross-section where the bulk of the space is cargo pods while there's a few buses' worth of seating up top.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 05:46
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Star Trek ships are only small when compared to the absolute largest ships in other genres. Well, they're small compared to most Capital ships in any sci-fi, it's just that Trek almost always focuses on naval capital ships instead of little ships run by a ragtag bunch of ruffins and hooligans. When JJ Abrams filmed his reboot movies of Trek one of the notable things that happened was that he doubled the size of all the ships, the reboot universe stuff is massive by comparison to original Trek. The big baddie evil starfleet ship in the second is bigger than any Starfleet ship seen in Trek before aside from the glimpses we've had of far-future Starfleet. Starbase Yorktown in the third reboot is an appreciable fraction of the size of the Death Star. (Although to be fair to Yorktown it's mainly a hollow bubble of air.) (And I think the comparisons may have been deliberate, it's kinda the anti-death-star and I loving love it) But yeah in terms of establishing scale it was always very hard to do with large ships back in the model days. The Motion Picture had a good go at it with the spaceship porn flyby and the spacesuited figures but that's infamous for having been over the top. (One little establishing thing that I did love was in the TNG opening when you can see people walking around inside the windows behind the bridge, it was always fun to spot.) It's a lot easier now, Discovery often has single-shot camera pans in from distance all the way in through windows to characters. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Apr 19, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2021 06:03
|
|
|
Hispanic! At The Disco posted:I had to make do with this book: loving loved that book, and the whole series. I only owned the Monsters one but I'd borrow them from the library at school every time i could. The alien on the cover looks so goofy. I like that Star Wars ships are multiple functions, you have giant battleships like the Star Destroyers, and small personal transports that one or two people can scoot around the galaxy in comfort. Its like how nature will fill every niche, designers and engineers in Star Wars will fill every niche for space ships. Though as is pointed out, Star Trek does tend to focus on ships that are part of a nations military or government. Small personal ships tend to be fairly rare and when they are, the bunkbed and previa comparisons are apt.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2021 05:06
|
|
|
When I was parsing through examples of Star Wars cross-sections, I found some fan-made examples for this ship, Kyle Katarn's Moldy Crow.   It seems like they disagree on the scale of the ship, but I think I like the second one better because I feel like any ship that some characters are depicted as "living out of" and being used for long distance transit should have some kind of bunk and some kind of bathroom. I even found a floorplan that has a third idea of how the ship is, and this guy who made an elaborate new 3D model of the exterior and interior.  It's at least very obvious that the ship's not got a lot of space to work with. In the X-Wing Miniatures game, it's not much bigger than an X-Wing or Y-Wing, using the same "small" ship base. I guess that's why it has a lower hull stat in the game. It's also much smaller than any of the YT-ships that Star Wars is pretty fond of using as bases for its characters, despite being designated in the fluff as another "light freighter". Maybe it has some good capability for hooking up external cargo.    And while I was looking up stuff about this ship, I was kinda confused because I felt like I didn't remember the ship looking exactly like that, and I was right, because I didn't really play through Dark Forces games, and apparently the Moldy Crow gets destroyed at the end and replaced by this thing in Outcast and Academy: the Raven's Claw.  Which I like the big round engines better than the Moldy Crow's weird flat engines, but the cockpit is just kinda a big rod that doesn't really seem to integrate with the wings. Probably even less room in there. I did find another fanmade cross-section of the Raven's Claw, but uh...eurgh.  Umm...I guess I'll just go down from top to bottom. I don't feel like Kyle Katarn planned ahead enough to have a bike ready, although I guess that's some useful cargo capacity there that the ship seems to otherwise be missing. I'd say the little breakfast nook seems like a poor choice when space inside the ship is at such a premium, and the perspective of the aft living space doesn't really line up right with the cockpit (which the side by side chairs are at least accurate to the game). I don't think the ship in the game ever launched any missles either. But down under the ship, it's just really gross and the reason why so many people don't bother humoring a lot of criticism of the Last Jedi because it gets lost under this horrible poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2021 23:18
|
|
|
I feel like all the Moldy Crow scale stuff can be blamed on the scale established in the game. If they didn't have Jan open the window to talk to Kyle, it would have been much easier to fudge. The Raven's Claw also has some massive scale discrepancies in-game. When we see the cockpit in a cutscene, it's wide enough to comfortably seat both Jan and Kyle:  But is noticeably way slimmer than an Imperial shuttle, which also sits two people side-by-side:  I think if you jump on top of it, it's barely wider than the player model.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2021 20:16
|
|
|
In Bruce Sterling's novel Schismatrix there's a ship called the Red Consensus. The ship itself isn't all that exciting: a smallish asteroid mining craft. But it's because it is a mining craft it has lasers and drills and whatnot which is important because it turns out those things make pretty good weapons. And that last bit is important because they're pirates, and also Red Consensus is the sovereign national territory of the Fortuna Miner's Democracy quote:But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy. Their attempts to do so only hastened their bankruptcy. a kitten fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Apr 24, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2021 16:31
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:When I was parsing through examples of Star Wars cross-sections, I found some fan-made examples for this ship, Kyle Katarn's Moldy Crow. Why are the side and top windows so huge when theres 0 window in front to even see where youre flying?
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2021 03:06
|
|
|
banned from Starbucks posted:Why are the side and top windows so huge when theres 0 window in front to even see where youre flying? You're supposed to only drift in that thing, even at hyperspeed.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2021 17:09
|
|
|
The pilot can sorta see forward through the top window if they pitch down, but otherwise, yeah no. In theory with good radar and targeting computer systems, you don't really need direct visibility around you even during combat, which is sort of implied by how the Millennium Falcon has an outboard cockpit, but that's not really addressed much in the fiction. I guess that cross-section tries to explain why Jan Ors had goggles. For longer journeys in space, you'd barely need direct view at all because most of the time you'd be surrounded by empty space and just setting long-distance headings, which is why real-world ships used to be fine with putting the helm on the back of the ship, and even modern wheelhouses are often fine with putting the helm towards the back of the room. You're only really in danger of collision when you're on a planet. So maybe the nose has collision detection and then the side windows are for eyeballing the rest of whatever area you're trying to park in. I guess as a stylistic decision it also downplays how aggressive the ship appears, since in the game it's not really meant for fighting itself, it's just a transport to take Katarn to a place where he can get off and do the fighting on foot, and then it can spirit him away at the end of the level. I feel like this design immediately looks more aggressive, even though it's largely the same concept but with better visibility.  And it's apparently meant to just be an armed hauler. But it seems like a weird concept to put your main thrust on an extending bit that has to maintain its extension in the opposite direction of the thrust force. Ah well, it's just concept art. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2021 19:45
|
|
|
EVE Online has some cool ship ideas, even if that game itself is a huge quagmire of drama... much like Star Citizen, I assume. I've always liked the world that the game made for itself, with the ship pilots being in complete direct control of their ships (to emulate a player playing them in game) and being buried in tightly armored capsules-cockpits deep within the ship. The ships themselves still had hundreds if not thousands of poor saps obeying the commands of the pilot and doing maintenance and loading guns and poo poo, but they were all much more expendable than the pilot themself. It kind of reminds me of a logical extrapolation of drone warfare in an over populated setting: the people who pilot the drone ships will be safe and sound far away, but its cheaper to get expendable schmucks to load the canons and grease the gears onboard than to make more machines do it, even if those guys will go down with the ship. Edit - they actually made an incredibly cross sections book of EVE Frigates, which is one of the smallest ship sizes. I love that due to the "you play as a space ship!" nature of the game, the in-game camera is always making your ship about the same size relative to the player viewpoint... but even this small ship size is loving huge to an in-game human bystander.  
jeeves fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 25, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2021 20:11
|
|
|
Oh, speaking of cutaways, Matthew Cushman did do a bunch for Trek... some here, although a lot aren't.  
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2021 21:44
|
|
|
Someone made a cool cutaway model of the Enterprise.    more
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2021 23:01
|
|
|
Linux Pirate posted:Someone made a cool cutaway model of the Enterprise. i;m big horny for that model
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2021 07:20
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2021 16:35
|
|
|
Lighthuggers from the Revelation Space series are kinda awesome. It's a setting without FTL so space travel between systems is done sublight. Lighthuggers are bigass ships with powerful engines that accelerate to .99c and then cruise at just below the speed of light until their turnover point where they begin braking thrust until they reach the destination system. Their general shape and emphasis on speed reminds me of an SR-71. Nostalgia for Infinity by Zando Zennek.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2021 23:52
|
|
|
Vernii posted:Lighthuggers from the Revelation Space series are kinda awesome. It's a setting without FTL so space travel between systems is done sublight. Lighthuggers are bigass ships with powerful engines that accelerate to .99c and then cruise at just below the speed of light until their turnover point where they begin braking thrust until they reach the destination system. Their general shape and emphasis on speed reminds me of an SR-71. here's another take. i have Revelation Space on the brain lately cuz i got several audio books on sale and have been mainlining them. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 00:02
|
|
|
Star Trek Online has some nice space ships original to the game. Jem'hadar Temporal Warship  Kiwavi class Bio-Cruiser  Daemosh class science vessel  Buran class dreadnought  Nov class science destroyer 
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 02:39
|
|
|
I can live with the idea of a science cruiser but a science destroyer just doesn't sound right.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 03:39
|
|
|
Zorak of Michigan posted:I can live with the idea of a science cruiser but a science destroyer just doesn't sound right. USS Varsity Football Team: to go where the science nerds went and give em all swirlies.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 04:27
|
|
|
In STO, when it comes to ship classes, Engineering = Tank/Healer (Not that healer is really a role in STO space), Tactical = DPS, Science = Space Magic with power drains and gravity wells and energy fields and things. And of course Destroyers are very small, nimble cruisers. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Apr 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 04:42
|
|
|
Specifically, 'science destroyers' in STO are dual-mode ships that can switch between a fast-attack mode and a science support mode. In the case of the Nov and its ilk, the ship's hull plates move around to extend or withdraw secondary cannons when changing. For the Starfleet's Titan class, the change is just turning a light on top of the ship red or blue. To sperg on the subject, Star Trek Online has three 'main' classes of ship: Cruiser Escort Science Vessel Seems straightforward enough, yes? But over the game's lifetime, there's an absurd proliferation of official ship classes. Try to guess what distinguishes each! Carrier Flight Deck Cruiser Strike Wing Escort Dreadnought Juggernaut Destroyer Science Destroyer Battlecruiser Warship Scout Ship Frigate Battlecruiser Raider Plus, Warbird variants of various above categories. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Apr 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 12:27
|
|
|
Starfleet is very anxious about being an armed military, so they put a lot of effort into justifying what a ship could do in peacetime. What if instead of having a nice smooth hull for all your spaceship parts to fit inside, you just loosely tied all the bits together and went "good enough"?  This is a board game about building a spaceship and then flying through space on a perilous truck route.  Players have to draw an place tiles under a time limit and make sure that they get all the modules they want and that they're connected properly with no exposed connectors. You probably also want redundant connections between parts of your ship too, because if you get damaged and lose the one bit that connects parts of your ship, half of the thing goes flying off never to be seen again. I've seen a round where one ship loses everything but a single crew quarters sailing to the end, but managing to beat another ship that stayed intact but lost all its crew and never made it home. Every ship ends up looking as a sort of monstrosity of parts all jumbled together haphazardly. These are actually really good designs by the game's normal standards.   There's also an app version that will show your ship zooming around. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2021 19:39
|
|
|
 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 04:30
|
|
|
I had that extra long viper on the left. It was modular and could swap parts with the satellite and the wheeled viper for some reason. None of them ever appeared in the tv show.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 05:32
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FemZ33lVZwk One of the most overlooked Imperial ships in Star Wars is one of my favorites. The Assault Gunboat is an Imperial shuttle with missile pods strapped to it and I think it looks great. Outside of Star Wars I'm quite fond of the spacenoid ships from Gundam. The Musai has a pretty unique spaceframe that reminds me of the negative space on a Romulan Warbird. 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 05:48
|
|
|
Gundam is insane and often doesn't stand up to close scrutiny but it understands the rule of cool.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 15:19
|
|
|
Zorak of Michigan posted:Gundam is insane and often doesn't stand up to close scrutiny but it understands the rule of cool. The Pegasus carriers all look great, especially the Albion and the Spartan with its double stacked launch bays.  
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 17:51
|
|
|
I just remembered my actual favorite ship of all time The good ol' Starship Titanic. I love any ship with just as much or more going on below the "waterline" as above.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 18:07
|
|
|
Oh I always loved that image. I just realised you can see the location of the book cover on the game art if you look closely, too!  
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 19:13
|
|
|
Legit good painting there of Starship Titanic.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 19:16
|
|
|
Well that does something for the sense of scale, wow! What a stunning ship. Please, do not prod my Achilles' buttock! It pains me greatly!
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2021 19:17
|
|
|
OK its technically a low orbit craft that gets deployed from a spaceship, but I love this stupid thing. quote:The Intruder is essentially a cargo lift platform that has been modified for combat use. Initially it was seen as a way to quickly transport ammunition, supplies and other equipment to soldiers in the field in the heat of battle. Once, a desperate yet enterprising ISA soldier somehow managed to successfully convince an Intruder pilot to transport some of his wounded comrades to safety, and so began its good reputation as a reliable dropship. quote:Instead of the standard infantry bay with troops exiting from a forward or rear door commonly found in many military dropships, the troops resort to riding directly on top of, often in dangerous fashion.The Intruder can carry a total of 10 combat-ready personnel. quote:Multiple Intruders are present in Killzone 2, commonly seen being destroyed by Helghast anti-aircraft weaponry, such as anti-aircraft guns and ARC cannons. It's supposed to be reminiscent of a WWII era landing boat or a modern pickup truck turned troop transport but it does too good a job emphasizing how vulnerable the passengers of both would have been, to the point that it looks like it was designed to kill all its passengers.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2021 09:55
|
|
|
That vehicle single handedly made that game absurd and stupid. Yes we're gonna cross light years of distance to invade this planet with piece of poo poo hiluxes from orbit. loving things didn't even have seatbelts. It's the kind of thing that would make sense for rag tag insurgents or something. But made zero sense for the aesthetic or theme of the game except being reminiscent of Higgins boats. Infidelicious fucked around with this message at 21:38 on May 7, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 7, 2021 21:35
|
|
|
It is perfectly emblematic of the ISA's arrogance and given Killzone's none-too-subtle criticism of neoliberal democratic powers engaging in ill advised foreign interventions, that dropship might as well be those piece of poo poo IED magnet jeeps that the UK was using before they switched to MRAPs transports.
Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 7, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 7, 2021 21:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 08:55 |
|
|
Arcsquad12 posted:It is perfectly emblematic of the ISA's arrogance and given Killzone's none-too-subtle criticism of neoliberal democratic powers engaging in ill advised foreign interventions, that dropship might as well be those piece of poo poo IED magnet jeeps that the UK was using before they switched to MRAPs transports. Invading and militarily defeating a weaker opponent on your own terms is the easy part of ill advised foreign interventions, if losing a large percentage of the initial attack force is a concern... they don't happen (See: North Korea, China). Unarmored vehicles worked perfectly fine during the invasion of Iraq; because they weren't out in front getting blown up for no reason... and they weren't IED magnets until they were driving down the same road(s) continuously for months / years. But the plan for an interplanetary invasion being "Throw some dudes in an open topped flying truck with no seatbelts into the upper atmosphere, and hope for the best" isn't emblematic of 'arrogance' it's emblematic of 'cartoonishly stupid'
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2021 23:39
|
|