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- Aug 10, 2013
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A fellow player showed some interest in a pic I shared recently, so I thought I'd make this project public, to let everyone have some half-finished eye candy.
It all started in the halcyon days of Minecraft, with a static, small scale, rough and clumsy recreation of the Retribution, based on the famous size chart drawn by a deviantart user by the name "TheFirstMagelord" (which later turned out to be quite wrong, both in size and detail)
The project was eventually abandoned because it was just too disheartening (and utterly pointless) to build a starship that'd never know the cold kiss of the void upon it's armored hull.
Work on the current Retribution replica started roughly a week after Nagygeri01 and I finished the Daedalos, and I needed to fill the creative void it left behind.
I've spent many hours on browsing for photos of the tabletop model - of which, back then wasn't too many around, and even those were low resolution and shot from a few angles only. Then, line by line, knob by knob, I went about trying to make sense of the blurry mess of the photo, and draw all the shapes that made up the hull.
Once that was complete, I spent time looking at gothic architecture and more TT models by Citadel; They make several cathedral and fortress props for 40k, and imperial ships being flying cathedrals, I figured they should be similar enough to serve as a basis for fine detail.
My old pc couldn't quite render the entire hull back then, and I favoured the colder seasons for construction, as an open window and brisk winter breeze managed to keep my system on decent temperatures.
'Geri often took screenshots on his vastly more powerful system to let me see if the ratios are right, and he also helped with copying a myriad of repeating shapes and decorations- as back then, the copy-paste tool didn't exist yet.
One time, the ship almost self destructed when I ran the first test firing of the broadsides; Missile turrets were still able to damage the main hull.
At another time, we cut off the entire prow to make it interchangeable via docking, so one hull could represent all the sub-variants - Only to learn, once it detached, it was virtually impossible to reattach, due to the docking beam's range. (Launch / catch rails didn't exist yet) ; So we had to paste back the whole thing, because too much construction happened since the last single-entity save.
I also made the broadside segments detatchable for the same reason. After constructing the other two types, I found there's little point in exchanging four big turrets for two small ones (macrocannon deck vs lance deck), and -being a scaled down replica - the ordnance bay is too small to house combat worthy craft.
That didn't stop me from installing a logic driven hangar system that could open the doors, launch the interceptors via clock triggered push-pulse engines (launch rails still didn't exist), and reload the launch bay with spare ships from an elaborate, three-way storage rack. Of course, once you emptied the bay, you were better off deleting the universe and spawning a new ship rather than to attempt cleaning up that mess.
Eventually the game underwent several optimizations, and I built my next rig that allowed me to immerse myself in ship building like never before.
In great bursts of construction, the ship improved weekly, often completely remodelling large sections, until I was happy with them. The eagle head on the prow had three or four versions, and truth be told, it could still be a little better....
Then Battlefleet Gothic: Armada was announced, and I felt the strangest thing; At once, I was overjoyed to see a BFG game, and on the other hand, it made all my work largely irrelevant;
My Starmade Retribution is, after all, scaled down, pixely, matte, silent, extremely straining to load, and it's combat effectiveness is quite dubious (both because of it's two-dimensional weapon layout and the inherent flaws in SM's combat).
So, that took out a lot of the fire from my progress, but I kept building, though at a much slower pace.
Every now and then a major bug or an ill thought out update further stalled my will to build, and so we reach the present day. I still intend to finish them all - and lay the keel of the cruiser that some of you might have noticed is missing from the pictures- but the current status is " No ETA "
Also, the mind that concieved that NPC ships with no pathfinding NEED to spawn and fly everywhere in groups should seriously reconsider it's own sanity. Those retarded guppies LOVE to ram imperial battlegroups and keep pushing against them like the side of their fish tank. Their existence is especially pointless in a singleplayer creative build-only game, yet takes some effort to nullify.
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