A more convenient block and building material.

[J03 51M5]

The other day I was playing around with some concepts, trying to make a small stealthy fighter, rather streamlined and areodynamic looking (not that either of those matter in space), when I encountered a problem. That problem was that it's quite difficult to make a small ship without everything getting clumped up and making your ship look like a angular lump of blocks (yes I know everything in starmade is made of block). As I was thinking of possible new designs to make my ship look more defined and 'stylish' whilst not beccoming too large, I though, instead of rethinking my entire design, with help of a different block, my design would work just fine. That different block is a flat panel, now i'v searched the forums for any thread relating to panels and all i'v found are threads relating to solar panels, which is not what I mean. What I'm suggesting is a flat block that acts just like a hull block but obviously takes up less room visibly, making it easier to keep smaller ships less cluttered. I also propose that either these panels are lighter but provide less protection, or have the block an even more condensed hull that is harder to make and more expensive to buy. Obviously each panel would come in all the colours hull block come in now and mabe even glass panels would be good.

I hope I'v put my point across clearly, so everyone understands what I'm talking about. I also hope that this hasn't been covered already, please let me know if it has, finally tell me what you think if it is a good idea or if it's needless.

Thanks J.Sims

 

[MikeV37]

I don\'t know why this isn\'t getting bumped more. This sounds great!



Some possible problems :

Can you put a block on a flat panel? What about other panels?

If you can\'t put a block on a flat panel, do you need corner and wedge panel pieces as well?



Alternative solution:

Make cloaking system weigh hull less and shields more (Only for cloaking systems). So a ship with 10 hull and 0 shield would show up as .5 mass, while with 5 hull and 5 shield would show up as 1.5 mass. (Example numbers not thought through)

Since shields would be more expensive it\'d draw people to using hull as protection.

Problems here: Servers that make hull useful will make stealth OP, and massive ships would be able to cloak. They\'d be weak, but still, it\'d be counterintuitive.



Another solution:

Make a stealth hull block. it costs as much as a hardened block, if not more, and offers less protection. It doesn\'t add mass when coutning for stealth. If stealth is linked to total mass count, it could just have half or less the mass of other hull blocks.

Problem: It makes hull more enticing, but doesn\'t necessarily make it enticing enough. Stealth ships with no hull will still be lighter, even if it\'s by a smaller margin. Alternatively, it will make non stealth ships go faster and turn faster even if they are massive ships, since they weigh so little.



Ultimately I think the problem here is that hull currently is pretty much just aesthetic. If hull actually offered protection for any length of time, people would use it more.

 

[J03 51M5]

Thanks for noticing my thread, I\'m currently keeping an eye on it on my phone. I\'ll get back to you with a better response once I get on pc then we can properly discuss the technicalities of this topic hopefully this topic will get more attention

 

[KuramaFox]

Stealth systems (radar jammer and cloak) need an overhaul sometime later in alpha or in beta. They are currently too broken, yet also too hard to use in anything that can be made to look like a half-reasonable ship. Which for now is fortunate because of brokenness, but in the future we\'ll want to do something about both.



This thread is about appearances though, not about actual stealth fighters. Thin paneling blocks could be a feasible way of helping with this for small ships (particularly if you want to have \"wings\" on one). Even so, you will be hard pressed to be able to make a small ship look particularly dazzling without sacrificing something. Their surface-to-volume ratio is just too high for small things. Corner blocks are helpful in this regard if you use them well.



However, it IS worth noting that fighters realistically aren\'t as small as some people think they are. An F-22 is 19 meters long and 14 meters wide, for instance. An F-15 is the same length, but 13 meters wide. Even the small things (like F-16s or F-35s) are still a good 15 meters long. Real life fighters are not all that small, or at least modern ones. Smaller World War 2 prop-driven ones got down to about 9 meters in length, but that\'s about as low as they get. Fighters just SEEM small because they are always being compared with bombers and capital ships, rather then the pilot inside of one. And because one of the best known examples of a space fighter is the rather tiny X-wing, which weighs in at only 12ish meters (which is still double the sometimes laughable tie fighter\'s 6-ish). At least the Y-wing was more like 16m.

So you don\'t have to build car-sized things to be a \"fighter,\" really. Contrary to what many people seem to think in this game. Or in the sci-fi industry for that matter. There is no reason you can\'t build a 16 or so block long fighter, aside from it suffering from mildly reduced manueverability relative to an 8-block long one (well, this depends also on how many armor pieces you clunk onto it too).

 

[J03 51M5]

As a slight entusiast of modern fighter aircraft, i entirely agree with the statements you have put forwards. I know that modern fightes only seem small due to being compared to larger vessels designed for different purposess, however, like you correctly said they are sizable compared to their operators, especially if you take into account Russian fighters which are significantly larger then their US and European counterparts. For example, even the smaller of the Russian fighters like the MIG series is longer and wider than the F-22 Raptor, the sukhois and the sukhoi stealth fighter simply dwarf the F-22 Raptor in comparison.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the primary reason I thought about paneling is not because the vessel I was constructing was too large, it was because upon applying an exterior to it, it became bulky, unshapely and (although it doesn\'t particularly matter) undesirable. I\'m sure if I scaled everything up it would probably have paid off but nontheless my goal was to build a small ship trying to keep it light and pretty flat (similar to a modern fighter). So thats what led me to the thought of panels, as \'thinner blocks=thinner ship\' (hopefully).

 

[KuramaFox]

Well, one thing you sometimes see in sci-fi settings are fighters that aren\'t completely covered by skin or armor. You can see bare machinery in some parts of them. Typically, guns, missiles, and some engine components. You may also see a shield emitter sticking out somewhere.

Apply this to your designs and it could help. Try seeing how good you can make a fighter that is only half-covered in armor. And don\'t forget those wedge pieces. You could stick a 2x2x2 nose at the front made of 4 wedges and 4 corners to \"sleek\" it up a bit.

Which reminds me. Using even symmetry may be helpful for a sleek looking fighter.

 

[J03 51M5]

I beleive that it is better, asthetically and gameplay wise, to try and leave areas of my ships uncovered. I mainly use hulls, wedges and corners to flesh out the shape of the craft once I have all of the functional components in place and opperational. I nearly always have my weapons exposed, thrusters (partly) and things like salvaging cannons too, in my opinion, having a fully covered ship makes hostile engagement less panic driven/exciting and makes ships look more plain and boring to look at.

However, I am relitively new to starmade and although I\'v heard people say to use your suggestions to make building ships easier and more asthetically pleasing, there are most likely still ways of dealing with creative problems that I haven\'t come across yet .

 

[J03 51M5]

I imagined a panel to occupy the same three dimention properties as a regular block, except for it\'s hitbox of course. Therefore if you tried to place a full block on a panel, it would be placed one block away from the panel (as if the already placed panel was a full block). As for placing panels on panels, I though that it would probably be best if you weren\'t able to do so, so that panels can only be placed on a full block, wedge or corner (not sure why you\'d want to place a panel on a wedge or corner but i can only imagine the creative ship designs people would conjure). Now thinking about wedge and corner panels. Im not entirely sure that corner panels would be nessisary as a wedge would probably do the trick. Wedge panels on the other hand could work by being placed on the edge of a block because at the moment you can only create peaks if you use wedges (or corners) on an even number of blocks but panels could be used to create peaks when you have an odd number of blocks.

If any of this is hard to follow, I\'ll try and upload some designs/concepts/illustrations over the weekend

Finally I don\'t quite follow you\'re suggestion about stealth blocks that reduce weight and what not as it sort of goes against common sense, adding blocks to reduce weight ? Sounds like you\'ll end up with huge ships that are almost massless. please feel free to phrase your suggestion another way and correct my thinking if i\'v got it totally wrong. thanks you regardless, you seem interested in this idea and i\'m gladd for all of your feedback and input

 

[MikeV37]

I think I\'ll try to post up some mock ups of different panel designs.



Hmm.. It\'s possible the effect you\'re going for could be achieved by inversing the current rendering of the block. I\'m not sure whether the engine can do this, but if it can, it shouldn\'t be that hard.

Basically a panel will only render a side if it borders another block, instead of if it doesn\'t border another block.

Then if you somehow made it so panels can\'t stack, you\'d pretty much have what you suggested.

Hit detection would stay the same, because who really cares if the panel is hit and destroyed, and it shouldn\'t have enough health to matter as armor.



What I meant for stealth ships, although it is a little bit of a tangent, is I was trying to find a way for stealth ships to not be as ugly. Yes, they\'d be larger, but since hull is basically paper anyway, it wouldn\'t affect their combat ability that much. In fact, it\'d make them weaker since they wouldn\'t have much in the way of shields.



The current problem with stealth ships/fighters is they need to be as efficient as possible in order to work, and hull simply... isn\'t. Any worthwhile cannon chews through hull like paper, and missles even more so.

It\'s also the reason for the completely naked shield and power blobs, which I personally detest.

If hull was made to be useful, people would use it.



I wonder if half slabs are possible to be implemented in the future? It would certainly help with the look of the sleek fighter types, but it\'d require something like 5 extra blocks (Which I\'ll draw up in a bit)

 

[MikeV37]

http://imgur.com/rqA9GFT



^ wouldn\'t these help with building a sleek fighter?



Of course they might be a bitch to code, who knows.



Also with people asking for all these new blocks, it might be a good idea to make all the colors a tab, so under the hull tab there\'d be the grey tab, red tab etc.

 

[Morrigi]

Plating like this, a much lighter but much weaker hull block, and inside corner blocks would work wonders here.

 

[Sundowner]

Well, I\'m having problems with aesthetics, if I want something to look different than the 2001 Space Oddysey Monolith - I have to scale it way up, 4:1 or more. For example Correlian Corvette started to take shape having 750m of length - that\'s 5 times the size it should be. What I would suggest is to make the hull blocks dividable. So if needed we could put blocks of let\'s say 0,25x0,25x0,25m - I would actually much prefer such abbility than the wedges and corners - that don\'t really work on all angles, and are a bit of a pain to go through all the alignment options.

I would then suggest that the hit box remained of 1x1x1m, but hp scaled down accordingly to the number of blocks occupying that space.