HMSS Hephaestus

[jayman38]

This is why when I post a ship that's as close to an established work as I can make it, I supplement the description with the statement that it's not really a recreation; it's a parody. (In the USA, a parody work is protected free speech and cannot be successfully sued... in a perfect world.)

I think I used that trick on one submitted Starmade ship so far, the YT-1930 Freighter from the Star Wars universe.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

Nice ship, I really like that YT variant. It's a lot more different from the 1300 than most variants, but still looks like it came from the same shipyard. What game/series is it from?

Decided to test out the new display logic to do something I briefly considered doing with rails before I realized just how insane the entity count would be. Damage display system - check.

Display on a timer
-----

Pretty minimal volume needs to display 13 weapon statuses. And only the bottom displays are needed on site, the rest can be buried wherever. (I doubt you'd actually need as many displays as I stuck at the bottom.)

Edit: Volume usage is still fairly high despite being lower than any similiar system on rails would have been. But any ship greater than say 100m long of mine will probably have this something like it. Particularly since you could have various repeater displays using the same core display blocks if you are careful to have locations line up well.

 

[Gasboy]

That's a neat damage display, dynamic yet incredibly simple.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

Thanks. I really like it, although with ships with more complex shapes the utility of a 2D display drops dramatically.

Haven't done too much recently, but since the newest update I've started fiddling around with possible upgrades for my lift systems using the new display options. No major design change is going to be possible (without extreme volume costs on the lift car) until we get the ability to check displays across entities, but it does solve the problem created by my previous upgrade from activation blocks to button blocks: that you couldn't see what numbers you had already pushed, or still worse, that someone else had pushed before you walked into the lift.

Fits in a fairly small 4x4x5 box. IMO: great for vertical lift segments and acceptable for horizontal lift segments.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

I've decided that I really don't like building based on effectively concept art, definitely prefer to either build from scratch (although these end up too ugly to post) or build from orthographic diagrams from which I can measure everything reasonably accurately.

That said I've found a project that I am both excited to finish and feel competent to do. I've been working for the past week or so building the Olympus Class Corvette from Babylon 5 (ship scale is somewhat... different.) Here are the source images I am using:

Spoiler

As you can see the images don't all agree with one another, so when in doubt I'm going to just pick the material I like the best. The most canon images are the bottom and second from the top on the right, but those are also really low quality so it's hard to base too much off of them.

Weird things with this ship that are going to take some experimenting to get right:

1. Deciding what the protrusions off the sides are, one I think is pretty clearly a docking port, the other I haven't the faintest.
2. The forward turrets in addition to being normal x/y rotating turrets also rotate around the z-axis (it appears.) I don't believe that StarMade allows 3-axis turrets? If it doesn't I will just put them on standard rotator blocks and have 5 rotation settings to rearrange them to maximize defense coverage (starboard, port, ventral, dorsal, even.)
3. There isn't supposed to be gravity. Honestly that just sounds like a pain with a lot of jerky movement so I will probably give it standard gravity but I might do a brief no gravity interior mock-up much later on to give it a try.

Under Construction Images:

Spoiler

Edit 10/17/16 to avoid bumping/triple-posting:

Regarding lift logic and displays. I just realized that add/replace regex completely outdates logic shift registers since it's much easier to do with a display block, which is awesome first because it shrinks the volume from roughly 5m^3 to 1m^3. Second, it's great because it is much simpler so there is just less room for a block or two to either stop working or be blown up resulting in a system which "works" but produces unintended results. Haven't updated anything to use it yet since I still expect us to get a way to transfer display info over wireless which would be even better.

Work has continued on the Olympus Class. Pictures below. This has been an amusing ship to work on due to it being symmetrical at various points, but I periodically forget that certain points aren't symmetrical and end up placing blocks in all sorts of unintended positions. Luckily nothing too bad has happened from that yet.

Spoiler: Pictures w/ comments:

Front view to give some indication of progress made. Those hangers are big enough to hold one starfury (Babylon 5 fighter craft on the left not made by me) above and below the viewable entrance so the ship can hold eight starfuries. Right now I've scaled them to fit WhiteFaulken 's excellent starfury, however I think I'm going to alter or make my own for when I release the Olympus to either have fewer entities (since it'll be an AI craft not a personal craft), or I'll put them on invisible rails and have them actually be point defense turrets which will station themselves around the ship on logic command.

Here is a brief clip which makes me think that the Olympus is intended to be able to carry 8 starfuries. (Possible 7 and 1 spare.)
-----

Port/Front
I've been working on the structure/girders connecting the four engine/gun tubes to the main structure and have played around with both hollow and filled options. Not sure what I'm going to do yet. Filled gives more volume and seems more faithful to the source images, hollow is just a tad more interesting/sensible IMO.
-----

Rear View.
I've been primarily working on the front but haven't entirely ignored the rear. Colors on those fuel cells (?) are very much work in progress. I'm thinking I'll change the Grey Advanced Armor of the cylinders to Dark Grey Advanced Armor and change the Dark Grey Standard of the tubes connecting them to Black Standard, but that's a lot of time (particularly if I don't like it after all) so I've been putting it off.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

A bit of context for a question about cross entity logic/rail communication:

I've started trying to figure out how to make deployable fixed point weapons. Right now I've got it set up so despite looking like a low profile 5x5 emplacement it's actually 11x7 without trapping any of that behind armor as the armor is actually attached to the weapon emplacement, so the entity tree is as follows:

Ship -> Docked Weapon -> Docked Armor
If the armor gets shot off it will just fall off. If the weapon gets shot off both it and the armor will be shot off. Hopefully this limits the expected collision calculation lag effects since nothing is trapped on all 6 sides.

However, at the moment it uses wireless modules to determine where the "Docked Weapon" entity is on the "Ship" entity's rail, I would really like to limit/eliminate their use since their connections can be buggy. (This is used to control the movement of the "docked armor so it doesn't move relative to the "Ship".) Does anyone know of a way for the "Docked Weapon" entity to determine where it is on the "Ship" entity's rail without using wireless?

Here are a couple of GIFs and images that will hopefully make the question clearer. The purple advanced armor is a temporary "Ship" entity I'm using while trying to figure this out:

Spoiler

I've mostly stopped stopped working on full ships while I wait for the quarters update since ripping out a ship's innards and doing a full redesign sounds painful, but I've done a bit more work on the Babylon 5 Olympus class shell:

Spoiler

 

[Jojomo]

You could instead have:

Ship ---> turret
     \---> docked armour

So the turret is docked to the ship, and the armour is docked to the ship.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

You could instead have:

Ship ---> turret
     \---> docked armour

So the turret is docked to the ship, and the armour is docked to the ship.

I could do as you suggest, and then have the two docks right next to each other and then surround them with warheads... which appeals for the lolz. There would be very little chance of only one of the two being disconnected. The reason I've got it set up as it is so that if the turret is shot off the armor won't trap the turret between the armor and the ship, creating lag/problems. Otherwise I'd just have the armor as part of the ship.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

Just got back into StarMade and have done a bit of work on the Olympus Class corvette, for non-StarMade values of corvette:

And a GIF of the rotating turret logic working:

 

[Shadow2Lead]

While waiting for power/quarter systems to progress to a point where I'm interested in finishing the Olympic and making interiors that make sense with the final hull detailing (windows, detailing by deck, turrets accessible from the interior, etc.) I've started working on Star Trek shells from the Earth-Romulan War era as imagined on The Starfleet Museum - A Report by Masao Okazaki. I've made decent progress on two of the Earth shells. The final goal is to have shells of these ships all in one pack on the dock. The only time ships from this era (well this depiction of this era) have made it into a game to my knowledge is an old total conversion mod for Star Trek Armada 2. So if the Starfleet Museum & Earth-Romulan War seem interesting that might be something to check out.

With that all said, the Armarillo Class Cruiser. This is the predecessor to the Krechet Class and will hopefully be able to be able to become the Krechet Class with some modifications , but I haven't done the measurements to see if that'll actually work, or if there are minor differences in size.

Armarillo Class (source1 & source2) screens:

Powhatan Class (source1 & source2) screens:

Cabbage Class (source1 & source2):
No progress yet.