The Valhalla: The making of a Heavy Assault Carrier

Superjudge · Nov 14, 2014

Off and on during the last year I have been building a titan. I had it up on the old forum but never bothered to repost it since I wasn't working on it at the time.

It started out life as concept art by Henry Pashkov as a ship he was modeling to potentially be in Star Citizen. I thought his design extremely striking so armed with a few screenshots, a general size comparison with the Bengal carrier and some ambition, I set to work to create it in Starmade. The hull alone took months just to get the shape right. Redoing a section here and a section there, until the hull was complete.

Then the trouble I had running the game cooled my enthusiasm for months. The ship sat an empty (albeit pretty) shell. A couple months back I started in on it again but I have to say that filling in the emptiness in a logical and meaningful way has been challenging. To my detriment I have gotten it in my head how much is left to do and thinking I'll never get it done has been a discouragement.

Then today I finally took a look at the things Keptick has been up to with the Charon titan build and I decided that rather than be discouraged, I needed to take a step back and look not at how much is left but at how much is done.

To that end I decided a ship section was in order. So, without further adieu, I present a cutaway view of the Valhalla.

I figure if I post some about it, I'll stay motivated to finish it. Thanks for reading!!!

Sven_The_Slayer · Nov 14, 2014

Wow, that's quite an interior.

Reilly Reese · Nov 15, 2014

It is a nice ship thats for sure.

Keep at it man!

Mariux · Nov 19, 2014

Very nice. Can we have some rear view pics?

StarchedPie · Nov 20, 2014

Mariux said:
Very nice. Can we have some rear view pics?

Hey! That's what I always ask...

Anyway, nice ship, but so far all we have seen is side on! Let's see everything! Also, I think it is a little flat - or it doesn't have enough different colours!

Mariux · Nov 20, 2014

StarchedPie said:
Hey! That's what I always ask...

Anyway, nice ship, but so far all we have seen is side on! Let's see everything! Also, I think it is a little flat - or it doesn't have enough different colours!

Do you :p ?

But yeah, more shots would be nice, as I said. Also, it's nice to see that quite a lot of old members are coming back recently.

Superjudge · Nov 20, 2014

I'll get some newer screenshots together by the end of the week. Been a busy one at work plus I've got some revisions to my main hangar I'd like to have done first. Plus there is this mysterious mirrored hole that I now have to fix. It never ends.

As for being too flat in reference to color, it is intentional. This is a warship, perhaps the tool of some far flung empire and used simply for intimidation. It could be the flagship for a fleet and the main carrier for its fighters or a base of operations for a planetary assault. I figure that in addition to its crew, it would have no trouble housing a marine assault force equipped with tanks or mechs of some kind. What it lacks in color, it makes up for in form.

I've actually got a couple different drop ships made to fit in the main hangar. The first one is a troop dropship and there is room for up to 4 of them in the hangar. The second really started out as an exercise to see how big a ship I could get in the hangar and wound up being a ridiculously large vehicle dropship. That one isn't finished and may never be but it was in interesting exercise and it does just barely fit in the hangar. I've got a third ship designed for the hangar which I suppose would be some sort of fast attack craft or even light corvette but is really just an attempt to make a mini Vallhalla. The hangar can house 4 of them as well. The troop dropship and light corvette are around 50m x 40m x maybe 15m. I think the hangar can house a ship that is somewhere on the order of 105m x 80m x 30m. Depending on the shape of the large ship you can actually still dock smaller ships in around it even though the docks overlap.

By the way, thanks to everyone for the replies.

Superjudge · Nov 23, 2014

Alrighty, As promised, here are the screens. I'll start off with the requested shots of the back of the ship.

Here is a shot over the "shoulder" of the port side nacelle.

In my lore, the ship relies quite a bit on the use of gases collected by gravitomagnetic ram scoops located along the front of the nacelles. The gases are shunted and condensed in storage chambers located within the nacelles. When needed, the gases are piped into these large acceleration chambers and then ported out through either the 4-pulse ion (blue) thrusters, the magnetoplasmadynamic (red) thrusters or both. These are the sublight speed thrusters. The pulse ion are the main thrust and the magnetoplasmadynamic is used to add extra kick to them.

The next couple shots are of the Aerospace operations or "Air boss" station.

Just a couple shots of the side details on the ship.

Here are some of the forward shuttle bay.

Complete with two personal shuttles.

Here's some shots looking aftward from the forward shuttle bay. The drone bay can be seen with doors opened and closed.

continued....

Superjudge · Nov 23, 2014

...continued

Here's a couple shots of the bridge and some details along the top of the ship just aft of the bridge.

Here are some views of the main hangar bay with some of my other ships inside.

I call this structure at the far end of the main hangar the "Grand Balcony"

Here are shots of the hangar bays that are adjacent to the main hangar.

A couple pilot briefing rooms.

View from the briefing room.

Pilot Storage lockers

Views from the second hangar deck.

...continued again

Superjudge · Nov 23, 2014

...continued again

View from the second hangar deck to what will either be main engineering or main life support.

Inside that area.

The next shots take us down that yellow lit hallway in the last picture, past the main power storage, into the nacelles and finally to the main spherical tokamak fusion reactors.

Next we venture below the life support / main engineering deck to the power converters, then to the drone repair bay.

...continued one more time!

Superjudge · Nov 23, 2014

...continued one more time!

After that we work our way back to the fighter / bomber launch bays.

Next is the bomber recovery deck. Its still pretty spartan and unfinished.

This hallway runs along the spine of the ship. I call it the "Promenade".

Here is a shot of the core room.

The rest of the interior, though separated into decks, is still rather dark and empty. So, I'll just show some other shots of the ships exterior.

Thanks for looking and your comments/ideas for improvement/ideas for filling the vast void with interesting things is greatly appreciated.

Grimson · Nov 23, 2014

That I one amazing ship. It all looks really good to me and I hope you continue onward.

Superjudge · Dec 18, 2014

Yes, I did rename this thread. "Aged like fine wine" was starting to bug me.

Just a very little update. After sitting dormant for what felt like forever I decided to take Valhalla out for a spin. My first stop was to a nearby planet for a little target practice. Valhalla features 16-forward facing plasma cannons and 8-heavy locking missile batteries. It's no doomsday weapon by any stretch of the imagination but for an assault carrier the 80,000 dps from the cannons and the 2.8 million damage from the locking missiles is somewhat respectable.

It took me a minute but I can safely call this one a "planet killer" with it's current configuration. I suppose I could spend a ridiculous amount of time min-maxing the weapons but I am pretty happy giving her defensive capabilities while still allowing her to fulfill her main role as a carrier.

After "millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced", I made my way over to a pirate station, fired up the turrets and went to work. One thing I did notice was that I think I really need to work on better turrets. While the light show was pretty impressive between the beam, cannon and swarm missile turrets, I am not sure how much damage they were really doing to the station. It took no time at all to turn it into swiss cheese but I am not sure if that was the main cannons talking or the turrets doing their thing.

The smaller turrets that I had on there did a pretty good job before the weapon redo. Now I fear they are sorely undersized. So, if anyone has any suggestions let me know. Conversely, if anyone would like to take a crack at building some better turrets for this beast, by all means please do so. The only thing that I ask is that you make them compliment the appearance of the rest of the ship.

Superjudge · Jan 5, 2015

Turret defense has been a major concern for me of late. I spent a bit of time spawning multiple groups of mobs to see how they perform. The 4-disc turrets on the ship spew out an impressive cloud of swarming missiles and are very effective but it has been the smaller turrets that have been of concern. To that end I have spent quite a bit if time updating the point defense capabilities of the ship.

I had initially planned to have the dome areas on the outer edges of the nacelles to be turrets but this was before the turret docking overhaul a while back (when turrets faced opposite directions when mounted on either side of a ship) and I would have had to have made them symmetrical fore to aft in order to make sure they looked the same on both sides of the ship. So I scrapped that idea.

Then I saw that Keptick had done that very thing so I brought back the idea and now I am sporting two huge side turret. Granted I am not topping 860k dps but then again my side turrets are only sporting 35000+ blocks each. They are getting a respectable 34000k dps each so I am happy with that.

As to the assortment of smaller turrets, I am replacing the old model with a new larger model sporting around 4 times the damage. I am also planning on upping the overall number of turrets on the ship.

My old clan mates don't play Starmade so I ditched the old clan logo that I had on the sides and also sexed up the nameplate as well.

There are some other updates such as adding a forward shuttle storage bay that houses personnel shuttles and the Captain's Gig but I'll post that up when I have more things done around it. Eh, here's a screenshot of how that is going.

The opening in the foreground descends down into the forward shuttle bay shown below...

I've also started messing with logic a bit starting with some flashing exit arrows for my launch bays. It's going along slowly as I am still figuring out how I want them to flash and figuring ways to speed up the sequence.

Additionally, I expanded the bottom flight deck for more bomber docking but that has left me with a large flat spot on the underside of the ship that is just screaming for more turrets. Thanks!

ltmauve · Jan 7, 2015

Superjudge said:
There are some other updates such as adding a forward shuttle storage bay that houses personnel shuttles and the Captain's Gig but I'll post that up when I have more things done around it. Eh, here's a screenshot of how that is going.

Most people would call that completed. :P
Though I looked at the first post, and boy do you have a lot of interior to do.

Superjudge · Jan 9, 2015

ltmauve said:
Most people would call that completed. :p
Though I looked at the first post, and boy do you have a lot of interior to do.

Soooo much interior. Some might call it a ludicrous amount of interior. At this point I am just working my way up from the bottom.

I am actually thinking about copying entire decks out and working on them individually. I figure it might be easier to visualize what I want to do with each deck.

Superjudge · Jan 11, 2015

I've had a comment or two about the color scheme but as I have said, my intention for this is as a warship. Having said the people on a warship still need some places to relax. Here is the first of those spaces.

Months in space can wear on the soul so what else can help to revive you but a garden? So here is my garden.

The garden is roughly the size of a football (U.S.) field. It extends through 3-decks and is located not too far behind the bridge.

Superjudge · Jan 28, 2015

Here's just a quick update. I have finished the turret refit. I was able to re-purpose some areas of the exterior of the ship that I honestly just did not know what I was going to do with. The sides along the narrow portion of the ship have been fairly bland and while I intended to place windows along those areas I still felt it needed something.

That coupled with my need for more turret defenses sparked what you see below. Before this update, Valhalla had 24 turrets of various types along the length of the ship. I have effectively doubled that number and am now standing at 50 turrets. Additionally, the large flat area that I had created by expanding the lower deck has been taken care of.

Visually, it is a twin ram-scoop atop a 5th ion pulse engine. Functionally, the lowest portion serves as an additional large turret whose stats are as of yet undefined.

Here are the pretties.

ltmauve · Jan 28, 2015

Glad to see you're working on the underside of the ship.

Drybreeze · Jan 28, 2015

Very inspirational. Your turrets on the nacelle alone are almost half the size of my frigate Thor.

Impressed.

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The Valhalla: The making of a Heavy Assault Carrier

Superjudge

Sven_The_Slayer

Reilly Reese

#1 Top Forum Poster & Raiben Jackpot Winner

Mariux

Kittenator

StarchedPie

Mariux

Kittenator

Superjudge

Superjudge

Superjudge

Superjudge

Superjudge

Grimson

Superjudge

Superjudge

ltmauve

Superjudge

Superjudge

Superjudge

ltmauve

Drybreeze

Simply complicated.