Hey there! Super late post this week. It seems to get worse and worse each week.
Anyway, I have a new ship to show you all! A few of you may have already seen this on the livestream we did over the weekend. This here is the Trading Guild's fighter. It might be larger than your average fighter. I am not sure there is a proper classification for it. Some even called it a gunboat. Either way this is a one man combat vehicle intended to escort the small freighter.
The ships come with the bare minimum for crew - which boils down to a pilots seat. Since these fighters are escorting small freighters, they do not go too long without docking at the next station.
Right so now that we have seen it, how does it perform? A lot of you have shown concern over Schine's skills with making good ships. There is certainly a science to it. I have learned a bit while making this fighter from viewers on the stream. I think I managed to nail down some capable systems on this ship. The TG will be known for utilizing some hard hitting cannons. Using pulse as a secondary was a terrible idea for the fighter so we settled for a cannon with punch through effect. It manages to take out another fighter fairly well. Facing off against accurate enemies using the same blueprint actually proved difficult, which is what I was looking for.
Below will be some stats for the fighter. Leave your feedback of course. If your comments are not actually constructive they WILL be removed.
Another thing of note was a change in design philosophy for the TG. As we fleshed out some stuff for the Outcasts we realized that the TG should have more defenses on their side. You guys had some valuable input as well.
- The Scavenger pirates will be focusing on armor, as it is easy to salvage off dead ships (including armor effects). They will also use missiles quite a lot, as cheap explosives fit their style. Warheads too maybe. Minefields. Now that is interesting.
- The Outcasts are a very neutral race. They are peaceful, but protective. As such we wanted them to stand between the Scavs and TG. They rely on salvaging and exploring in order to accumulate resources. Their ships use either shield tanking or armor tanking from ship to ship. They also utilize fixed weapons and turrets equally.
- This leaves the Trading Guild. Before I said they didn't have much in terms of defenses as their fleets were nigh expendable. I've come to the conclusion that the TG would more likely utilize preventative measures more so than the other two. AMS turrets will be commonplace across the TG fleet. They will also use extensive jump drive technology and shield tanking. Some ships will even have Ion effect installed.
That's about it for this week. We will be seeing some new TG ships over the next few weeks before we move onto Outcasts assets!
Sorry just catching up to see what I missed, scrolling through everything to look at the pictures, and I have to say I really like the look of the fighter!
Its just, the cockpit isn't a... fighter cockpit. (Which if this is a theme of the TG then that is perfectly fine, its just if other ships have higher visibility cockpits than the fighter it would be weird.)
I also had something similar when I was constructing a ship that I knew would be larger than the typical fighter but still wanted it to feel like one somewhat aesthetically. My original design of a "keyhole" type cockpit at the front to represent that the fighter controls were protected and embedded and that it used, say, cameras to get a full 360 degree view was a good plan in theory... But didn't seem like it fit with the rest of the idea. I kept a save of the thing to maybe use as a drone version, but it, while unique, would not work well for the manned versions and just didn't click with me.
I eventually decided to forgo the keyhole look, along with any chance to have a superbeam output cluster out of the front for lols, and decided to try my hand at a more traditional cockpit design.
By just taking some inspiration from some WW2 planes and bombers, I think I was able to successfully pull off a convincing fighter look simply by adding "enough" glass above and around the pilot seat to where it enveloped it and created a high visibility environment.
When you get close like these pictures you can see that it is actually quite large, and has seating for 2-3 people, with walking space in the below deck, but when viewed
from afar the details just kinda merge together and gives it a fighter style look, even if it is actually quite large compared to other ships out there.
What I am trying to say is, I think the fighter would benefit from more glass above the pilot seat.
TLDR:
I posted pictures (specifically the third one) where I think the TG ship would look good if it had more of a visibility setup like that one (but down-scaled of course).
500 mass is not "big" for a fighter, maybe for one that is atmospheric and Dave scaled and fights land vehicles on planet plates, but not for the vacuum of space :P
