- Joined
- Jul 13, 2014
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I'll be posting various design ideas, pictures, drawings, etc.
Design epiphanies:
1. Don't worry too much about making halls fancy; if one embraces the blocky nature of the game, you can fit more stuff in, and replace geometric detail with decoration block detail.
2. Try to fit more features into the same space and try to make good use of the Y dimension. You can make some really fun surprises in places where people don't think to look. Reward explorers.
3. When building a RP ship, don't focus on ability. Someone will always have a bigger, faster, deadlier, sexier ship.
4. You probably want to stick with regular hull instead of more expensive stuff, so that the structure is economical.
5. If you start off a non-45-degree angle with a wedge, the length of the angled edge doesn't have to be as long. This is important for fitting more detail into the same space. Example: When making an angle with a length-over-height ratio of 2, the length can be 1+(h-1)*ratio, cutting off one extra block that is not really needed. For a ratio of 3, you save 2 blocks.
Public Ships done so far:
1. Simple Aluminum Mallard. GOG.com is selling Space Quest games, so I think I will permanently shelve plans to smooth out the StarMade design. Wedges really made it better. I'll smooth it out if anybody shows themselves a Space Quest fan by requesting an improvement again. (Good feedback in the original community content upload.) The Aluminum Mallard works surprisingly well as a pirate ship!
2. "Cryogenic Depot" space station for the space station contest (specifically, the abandoned station part). It got 8 votes. Better than 1, but no where near the hundreds that the most popular station got. Fun details. The area logic didn't work the way I expected, and the clock logic didn't work smoothly. (Boo!) I think it's pretty.
3. Star-Trek inspired Theatrical. I consider Star Trek ships relatively ugly. There's something fun in working with "ugly", but while I originally thought the Theatrical would be simply the first in a long line, I will shelve that plan indefinitely, with the Theatrical being the only public release. I'll reconsider if I get requests for more, but so far, public response has been cool.
Private, non-published ships done so far:
1. Super-simple basic ship from starting blocks. Probably got recycled into the Aluminum Mallard.
2. 300-m-long "doom cube" with a dozen or more anti-pirate turrets. Had to be abandoned in a system near a shop that was near a planet. The proximity of the planet was crashing the game. I was barely able to turn away and limp away from the planetary system to continue my adventures in that universe. The core was encased in an armored "tube". The cube was constructed around the tube. The tube was capped on both ends by glass, and the doors led into the cube area, and then there were external doors on the cube.
3. 9-m-cube "doom cube" turret with rapid-fire cannons for the above "doom cube".
4. 200-m "python" ship. No wedges. All cubes. a dozen rapid-fire anti-pirate turrets. I still have it.
5. 13x14x9 m "poison-spitter" turret for the python ship. One is currently damaged from pirates when I was pre-occupied away from the ship and should probably be recycled. They work well. Subtle wedges on the outer edges, but otherwise, these are mini-doom-cubes.
Planned ships:
While researching ship designs for the "Theatrical", I found lots of good stuff about realistic spaceship design from the 50s and 60s. Thus began my plans for the "Clarke", named for Arthur C. Clarke.
1. "Clarke" This ship will be more closely related to the main spaceship from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". After I recently found out that the "Dave" avatar is named (and at least partially designed after) "Dave" from "2001", this ship design strikes me as being more in-line with what the game designers originally had in mind for the game. Basic bar-bell design, with a fat engine pod at the back, and a large habitation pod at the front, separated by the barbell handle. (A rod separating the two pod structures).
A. Also including "radiator" fins. After some research, found out that Black was the optimum color for radiation. To avoid absorbing more heat than radiating, while near a heat source, decided to add an additional set of larger White fins on either side of a black fin, to reflect external radiation away. Will probably make the white fins out of mostly wedges, arranged in such a way as to reflect radiation from the black fins away, so that it's not just reflecting all the radiation right back to the source.
B. The "Reactor" will be a relatively blocky cube (maybe have a single-width wedge line along each edge to round it off), with slightly larger, 7-m thick "lead radiation shields" on both the front and back of the reactor pod, to create "radiation shadow" in which the rest of the ship can be placed without getting radiation from the reactor. I will make the reactor pod with several embedded 3-D "L" power block groups for some decent power generation. I also made a simple design showing the radioactive symbol within a 21x21 space on the reactor pod itself. That should look cool if the outer part is plex doors contrasting with grey hull, and then underneath will be a single layer of glass. Underneath that will be power storage blocks. Hopefully, they would glow out of the glass, so that when the plex doors are open, the radiation symbol will glow with a sickly green light. That would be Neat! Can't wait to try it out....
C. I will probably make the Clarke quadrilaterally symmetrical. I will avoid red/green lights and instead focus on just white light, especially on the exterior, so that the ship is no longer a "space plane", but is instead a real spaceship with very little in the way of "left" or "right". I'll also point all the artificial gravity generators to the rear of the ship, so that gravity works along the same axis as forward travel.
D. I plan to create a magnificent rocket cone behind the rear radiation shield. I'll try to make better use of visible thruster exhaust. I'll have an empty area directly behind the thrusters, then a glass wall behind that, followed by probably a logic-controlled wall of plex door, so that the engines can be "turned off". The thin layer of thrusters in the cone will be primarily for show. There will need to be many more thruster blocks elsewhere in the ship design to give it decent mobility. (For larger ships, I am generally happy with a 0.5 thrust-to-mass ratio.)
E. Similar to the "Theatrical", I'm designing the "Clarke" to fit in a length of 199. It makes the ship rather stubby, and the habitation pod needs to be smaller to fit within the radiation shadow. In contrast to the "Theatrical", since the "Clarke" fits better with the game's original design ideals, and doesn't directly conflict with any litigious property, I'll probably proceed with larger redesigns, as I learn more about how the "Clarke" comes together in actual block construction.
F. I don't need so many floors, so the rear half of the barbell handle at the middle of the ship will be where the primary thruster pod goes. From a RP-perspective, maybe this could be considered fuel storage. This area will contain mostly thruster blocks, plus maybe a pair of 3-D "L" power generator groups. Plus, lines of power generators can be implemented along the inner wall of the barbell handle from one end to the other. The top of this thruster pod in the barbell will be the bottom floor of the habitable part of the spaceship.
G. Due to the geometry of the ship, the middle of the barbell, right above the primary thruster pod within the rear half of the barbell is the best place for the ship core. Essentially, the bottom of the habitable space of the spaceship. Place it precisely in the center of the quadrilateral symmetry. And then this location front-to-back will place it almost in the exact center of the ship. The radiator fins rise out from the rear of the barbell within the radiation shadow and provide excellent protection for the ship core from all angles. Outer doors placed near the radiator fins in this area will provide relatively easy access to the core, without compromising protection.
H. I may or may not experiment with gravity elevators in this design. Since I want my ships to be used by multiple astronauts at the same time, I really want to avoid such a kludge. Therefore, there is a symmetrical pair of stairwells/rampwells leading up (in this design, with the gravity generators pointing to the rear of the ship, "up" and "forward" are the same direction) to the habitation pod from the middle of the barbell.
2. "Leopard CV". This is a Battlemech Aerospace Dropship design. Some game players may recognize this stuff from the "Mech Commander" or "Mechwarrior" video game or tabletop franchise. This design is small enough (53m x 20m x 70m) to be built from the leftovers of my "Theatrical" build. It's already coming along nicely.
A. The magnificent "wing" at the rear of the ship is a lot of fun, but doesn't allow for a lot of useful blocks. It's basically a thin layer of hull blocks laid out in a wing shape. With plans laid out over the original artist drawings of the ship, I think I got close. The drawing had a ridiculously wide wingspan. Shortening the wingspan just a bit allowed the design to fit neatly within its original size specification.
B. To maximize the internal volume and reduce the need for odd "circle emulation", I kept the main body rectangular instead of cylindrical. This resolved a number of potential problems. For instance....
C. Changing the nose cone to look more like the original "Leopard" dropship worked well. I originally put the external camera on the outside of the nosecone looked OK, but dropping it behind a black hull block looked great, and didn't compromise the forward view whatsoever.
D. The original Leopard CV spec showed six very tiny doors and room for six aerospace fighters. No way that was going to fit in this design! For one thing, the minimum docking block is 7x7x7. So, six 7x7 doors, three on each side. There are three 7x7x7 docking areas directly behind the doors. Technically there are six. 3 in the floor, 3 in the ceiling, pointed down. Only three can be occupied, but this is the closest I could get to matching the original design spec. B for effort, at least?
E. The ship is much smaller than the original artist renditions would suggest. They put a lot of detail that made the ship look bigger than its specs. The main body is really only 12 m tall. By the art detail, you'd think it was 50!
F. Two logic activation blocks: one for the majority of lights, including the red/green (left/right) running lights in the tail wing, plus most of the internal lighting, for the RP purpose of "running silent". Goes well with the jammer block. The second activation block opens and closes all six hanger doors. They glow blue in the cockpit area. This is one time when I wish the activation blue glow didn't glow quite so brightly.
G. I accidentally made the original block build 75 m long instead of 70 m. I liked the main hull section, so it called for completely rebuilding the lovely tail wing. I was disappointed that copying and pasting did not help the refit effort. Bah, the trials and tribulations of art design! Most of my screenshots are with the old over-long build. I need more screenshots of the new build before I post it in community content. Yes, this will be done well before the Clarke is even close to completion.
H. I will probably build a refit with some basic shielding and combined weaponry. The shield-less original build is pretty accurate to the design spec weapon layout: 3 "large laser" turrets (in my design, a large laser is simply a 2-block beam weapon plus its computer.) 2 "large lasers" in the main body, each with its own computer so the pilot can shoot one then the other. 2 "PPCs" in the main body. These are 2-block beam weapons with 1-block beam slaves for added range. They also have slaved blue lights, so that the outline is blue. (Lasers by contrast are slaved to red lights, for a red-outline on the beam.) 3 linked "medium lasers" (single-block beams) in the main body, supplemented by 2 separate "pulse medium lasers" (single-block beams with single-block cannon for rapid-fire, linked with red lights).
I. I left out the LRMs (Long Range Missile Launchers), since the Battletech universe uses ammunition for missile systems, and even a single-block missile system would probably be overwhelming against a ship without shields.
J. The energy production in this design seems to be overly powerful for the energy draw of its systems. It can fly with permanent jamming, and with a weapon firing without losing energy storage.
K. It has a roughly 2.5 thrust-to-mass ratio, so it should have enough get-up-and-go, and should have no problem landing on and taking off from planets. It is a dropship, after all.
L. Right now, there is a lot of energy storage blocks to fill in space. That isn't really needed, so the shield-and-weapon refit will probably see a lot of those energy storage blocks replaced with shield storage blocks. I'll probably replace the unusable ceiling dock blocks with shield regenerators. The regeneration will be tiny. Finally, the multiple weapon systems will be combined into 2 or 3 distinct beam weapons with cannon slaves for rapid fire.
M. The tiny stabilizer wings near the cockpit can barely be seen. Maybe I should have built them with a different color to make them stand out.... They do have red/green left/right navigation lights in them.
N. With so little internal volume, I had to opt for all-wedge 45-degree stairwell leading up to the bridge. I normally prefer a lesser slant (22.5-degree ramp), but there's no room for that in this design.
O. There are two sets of vertically-aimed thrusters along the bottom. This allows for better VTOL capability from a RP perspective. Strangely, I found that the red exhaust still points to the rear of the ship, even if their source blocks are turned down. Looks odd. I hope they fix the visual thrust output vector soon.
3. Since the Leopard CV is coming along so well, I want to do a "Leopard" dropship next. This design will have more internal volume, since it lacks a magnificent tail wing. The wings are just simple extensions of the base plate.
A. I'll probably add not only baseplate wings to correspond with the original Leopard design, but I'll probably also add a second pair of wings above the engines to correspond with the "Mechwarrior Online" redesign. I'm tempted to change the upper wings to being forward-swept. I always liked forward-swept wings. Since there will be two sets of wings, a forward-swept pair won't be so ridiculous. I'm not sure how many people play "Mechwarrior Online", so I wonder if anyone will care that the upper wings are forward-swept. Since the redesign doesn't have a second pair of wings, I'll go for it, as my own design flair.
B. The internal volume should be large enough to contain four separate docking areas of 9x13x9 each. The docking modules will each be enhanced with a vertical line group of 3 docking enhancers.
C. That docking design will require an absolute minimum vertical size of 15 blocks. Since the fins on a Leopard are so stubby, I think this will be perfect. The width will require an absolute minimum width of the main body of 20 blocks. No problem.
D. The nose of the Leopard will be similar to my Leopard CV nose. However, the front of the nose can be lower. The nose tip can probably be one or two meters off the floor of the ship. I'll probably stick to 2 meters, and have two sets of wedges leading up to the flat front part of the nose. Then there will be more wedges along the front, leading up to the tiny pilot slits.
E. I plan to stick with the original small bubble turrets I made for the Leopard CV. However, the art for the Leopard's original turrets show two matching barrels on the turret behind the cockpit (and maybe slightly longer), so I may make a two-beam Leopard bubble turret specifically for the Leopard.
F. The original Leopard design showed angled hull along the sides, narrowing at the top. For StarMade, I'll take a hint from the "Mechwarrior Online" redesign, and make the main body more boxy. That will make things much easier and will allow stuff to actually fit the design.
4. The Union dropship, also from Battletech. This is only in the preliminary outer-hull design stage. I have figured out approximately where the ship core will go at the center of the design, but I will need to work on the surrounding superstructure to both allow RP astronaut navigation around the ship, and adequate systems. By definition, the dropship will be short on weapons, have no shields at first, and no jump drives. In the literature, it has more than twice as much mass as the Leopard, and it looks like it will end up with a lot more internal volume. I have a neat design for using plex door blocks in the landing gear to approximately match the original artists' rendition of the Union with its landing pads deployed. Not quite a good fit, but I got the primary gear moved in, so that the ship is not considered by StarMade to be any wider than it should be. Angled plex door wedge (thank you Schema!) will provide a 45-degree stairwell in each landing foot, to allow planet-side astronauts to walk up into the main ship body without significant jumping skills. Similar to the Clarke, I'll design the ship so that "up and forward" are in the same direction. The battletech universe doesn't have gravity generators, so I'll leave those out unless requested. Even then, it'll only go into the shielded refit.
5. Clarke-based designs. Not even on the drawing board yet....
Battletech data on the Sarna Wiki:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leopard_CV
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leopard
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Union
Design epiphanies:
1. Don't worry too much about making halls fancy; if one embraces the blocky nature of the game, you can fit more stuff in, and replace geometric detail with decoration block detail.
2. Try to fit more features into the same space and try to make good use of the Y dimension. You can make some really fun surprises in places where people don't think to look. Reward explorers.
3. When building a RP ship, don't focus on ability. Someone will always have a bigger, faster, deadlier, sexier ship.
4. You probably want to stick with regular hull instead of more expensive stuff, so that the structure is economical.
5. If you start off a non-45-degree angle with a wedge, the length of the angled edge doesn't have to be as long. This is important for fitting more detail into the same space. Example: When making an angle with a length-over-height ratio of 2, the length can be 1+(h-1)*ratio, cutting off one extra block that is not really needed. For a ratio of 3, you save 2 blocks.
Public Ships done so far:
1. Simple Aluminum Mallard. GOG.com is selling Space Quest games, so I think I will permanently shelve plans to smooth out the StarMade design. Wedges really made it better. I'll smooth it out if anybody shows themselves a Space Quest fan by requesting an improvement again. (Good feedback in the original community content upload.) The Aluminum Mallard works surprisingly well as a pirate ship!
2. "Cryogenic Depot" space station for the space station contest (specifically, the abandoned station part). It got 8 votes. Better than 1, but no where near the hundreds that the most popular station got. Fun details. The area logic didn't work the way I expected, and the clock logic didn't work smoothly. (Boo!) I think it's pretty.
3. Star-Trek inspired Theatrical. I consider Star Trek ships relatively ugly. There's something fun in working with "ugly", but while I originally thought the Theatrical would be simply the first in a long line, I will shelve that plan indefinitely, with the Theatrical being the only public release. I'll reconsider if I get requests for more, but so far, public response has been cool.
Private, non-published ships done so far:
1. Super-simple basic ship from starting blocks. Probably got recycled into the Aluminum Mallard.
2. 300-m-long "doom cube" with a dozen or more anti-pirate turrets. Had to be abandoned in a system near a shop that was near a planet. The proximity of the planet was crashing the game. I was barely able to turn away and limp away from the planetary system to continue my adventures in that universe. The core was encased in an armored "tube". The cube was constructed around the tube. The tube was capped on both ends by glass, and the doors led into the cube area, and then there were external doors on the cube.
3. 9-m-cube "doom cube" turret with rapid-fire cannons for the above "doom cube".
4. 200-m "python" ship. No wedges. All cubes. a dozen rapid-fire anti-pirate turrets. I still have it.
5. 13x14x9 m "poison-spitter" turret for the python ship. One is currently damaged from pirates when I was pre-occupied away from the ship and should probably be recycled. They work well. Subtle wedges on the outer edges, but otherwise, these are mini-doom-cubes.
Planned ships:
While researching ship designs for the "Theatrical", I found lots of good stuff about realistic spaceship design from the 50s and 60s. Thus began my plans for the "Clarke", named for Arthur C. Clarke.
1. "Clarke" This ship will be more closely related to the main spaceship from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". After I recently found out that the "Dave" avatar is named (and at least partially designed after) "Dave" from "2001", this ship design strikes me as being more in-line with what the game designers originally had in mind for the game. Basic bar-bell design, with a fat engine pod at the back, and a large habitation pod at the front, separated by the barbell handle. (A rod separating the two pod structures).
A. Also including "radiator" fins. After some research, found out that Black was the optimum color for radiation. To avoid absorbing more heat than radiating, while near a heat source, decided to add an additional set of larger White fins on either side of a black fin, to reflect external radiation away. Will probably make the white fins out of mostly wedges, arranged in such a way as to reflect radiation from the black fins away, so that it's not just reflecting all the radiation right back to the source.
B. The "Reactor" will be a relatively blocky cube (maybe have a single-width wedge line along each edge to round it off), with slightly larger, 7-m thick "lead radiation shields" on both the front and back of the reactor pod, to create "radiation shadow" in which the rest of the ship can be placed without getting radiation from the reactor. I will make the reactor pod with several embedded 3-D "L" power block groups for some decent power generation. I also made a simple design showing the radioactive symbol within a 21x21 space on the reactor pod itself. That should look cool if the outer part is plex doors contrasting with grey hull, and then underneath will be a single layer of glass. Underneath that will be power storage blocks. Hopefully, they would glow out of the glass, so that when the plex doors are open, the radiation symbol will glow with a sickly green light. That would be Neat! Can't wait to try it out....
C. I will probably make the Clarke quadrilaterally symmetrical. I will avoid red/green lights and instead focus on just white light, especially on the exterior, so that the ship is no longer a "space plane", but is instead a real spaceship with very little in the way of "left" or "right". I'll also point all the artificial gravity generators to the rear of the ship, so that gravity works along the same axis as forward travel.
D. I plan to create a magnificent rocket cone behind the rear radiation shield. I'll try to make better use of visible thruster exhaust. I'll have an empty area directly behind the thrusters, then a glass wall behind that, followed by probably a logic-controlled wall of plex door, so that the engines can be "turned off". The thin layer of thrusters in the cone will be primarily for show. There will need to be many more thruster blocks elsewhere in the ship design to give it decent mobility. (For larger ships, I am generally happy with a 0.5 thrust-to-mass ratio.)
E. Similar to the "Theatrical", I'm designing the "Clarke" to fit in a length of 199. It makes the ship rather stubby, and the habitation pod needs to be smaller to fit within the radiation shadow. In contrast to the "Theatrical", since the "Clarke" fits better with the game's original design ideals, and doesn't directly conflict with any litigious property, I'll probably proceed with larger redesigns, as I learn more about how the "Clarke" comes together in actual block construction.
F. I don't need so many floors, so the rear half of the barbell handle at the middle of the ship will be where the primary thruster pod goes. From a RP-perspective, maybe this could be considered fuel storage. This area will contain mostly thruster blocks, plus maybe a pair of 3-D "L" power generator groups. Plus, lines of power generators can be implemented along the inner wall of the barbell handle from one end to the other. The top of this thruster pod in the barbell will be the bottom floor of the habitable part of the spaceship.
G. Due to the geometry of the ship, the middle of the barbell, right above the primary thruster pod within the rear half of the barbell is the best place for the ship core. Essentially, the bottom of the habitable space of the spaceship. Place it precisely in the center of the quadrilateral symmetry. And then this location front-to-back will place it almost in the exact center of the ship. The radiator fins rise out from the rear of the barbell within the radiation shadow and provide excellent protection for the ship core from all angles. Outer doors placed near the radiator fins in this area will provide relatively easy access to the core, without compromising protection.
H. I may or may not experiment with gravity elevators in this design. Since I want my ships to be used by multiple astronauts at the same time, I really want to avoid such a kludge. Therefore, there is a symmetrical pair of stairwells/rampwells leading up (in this design, with the gravity generators pointing to the rear of the ship, "up" and "forward" are the same direction) to the habitation pod from the middle of the barbell.
2. "Leopard CV". This is a Battlemech Aerospace Dropship design. Some game players may recognize this stuff from the "Mech Commander" or "Mechwarrior" video game or tabletop franchise. This design is small enough (53m x 20m x 70m) to be built from the leftovers of my "Theatrical" build. It's already coming along nicely.
A. The magnificent "wing" at the rear of the ship is a lot of fun, but doesn't allow for a lot of useful blocks. It's basically a thin layer of hull blocks laid out in a wing shape. With plans laid out over the original artist drawings of the ship, I think I got close. The drawing had a ridiculously wide wingspan. Shortening the wingspan just a bit allowed the design to fit neatly within its original size specification.
B. To maximize the internal volume and reduce the need for odd "circle emulation", I kept the main body rectangular instead of cylindrical. This resolved a number of potential problems. For instance....
C. Changing the nose cone to look more like the original "Leopard" dropship worked well. I originally put the external camera on the outside of the nosecone looked OK, but dropping it behind a black hull block looked great, and didn't compromise the forward view whatsoever.
D. The original Leopard CV spec showed six very tiny doors and room for six aerospace fighters. No way that was going to fit in this design! For one thing, the minimum docking block is 7x7x7. So, six 7x7 doors, three on each side. There are three 7x7x7 docking areas directly behind the doors. Technically there are six. 3 in the floor, 3 in the ceiling, pointed down. Only three can be occupied, but this is the closest I could get to matching the original design spec. B for effort, at least?
E. The ship is much smaller than the original artist renditions would suggest. They put a lot of detail that made the ship look bigger than its specs. The main body is really only 12 m tall. By the art detail, you'd think it was 50!
F. Two logic activation blocks: one for the majority of lights, including the red/green (left/right) running lights in the tail wing, plus most of the internal lighting, for the RP purpose of "running silent". Goes well with the jammer block. The second activation block opens and closes all six hanger doors. They glow blue in the cockpit area. This is one time when I wish the activation blue glow didn't glow quite so brightly.
G. I accidentally made the original block build 75 m long instead of 70 m. I liked the main hull section, so it called for completely rebuilding the lovely tail wing. I was disappointed that copying and pasting did not help the refit effort. Bah, the trials and tribulations of art design! Most of my screenshots are with the old over-long build. I need more screenshots of the new build before I post it in community content. Yes, this will be done well before the Clarke is even close to completion.
H. I will probably build a refit with some basic shielding and combined weaponry. The shield-less original build is pretty accurate to the design spec weapon layout: 3 "large laser" turrets (in my design, a large laser is simply a 2-block beam weapon plus its computer.) 2 "large lasers" in the main body, each with its own computer so the pilot can shoot one then the other. 2 "PPCs" in the main body. These are 2-block beam weapons with 1-block beam slaves for added range. They also have slaved blue lights, so that the outline is blue. (Lasers by contrast are slaved to red lights, for a red-outline on the beam.) 3 linked "medium lasers" (single-block beams) in the main body, supplemented by 2 separate "pulse medium lasers" (single-block beams with single-block cannon for rapid-fire, linked with red lights).
I. I left out the LRMs (Long Range Missile Launchers), since the Battletech universe uses ammunition for missile systems, and even a single-block missile system would probably be overwhelming against a ship without shields.
J. The energy production in this design seems to be overly powerful for the energy draw of its systems. It can fly with permanent jamming, and with a weapon firing without losing energy storage.
K. It has a roughly 2.5 thrust-to-mass ratio, so it should have enough get-up-and-go, and should have no problem landing on and taking off from planets. It is a dropship, after all.
L. Right now, there is a lot of energy storage blocks to fill in space. That isn't really needed, so the shield-and-weapon refit will probably see a lot of those energy storage blocks replaced with shield storage blocks. I'll probably replace the unusable ceiling dock blocks with shield regenerators. The regeneration will be tiny. Finally, the multiple weapon systems will be combined into 2 or 3 distinct beam weapons with cannon slaves for rapid fire.
M. The tiny stabilizer wings near the cockpit can barely be seen. Maybe I should have built them with a different color to make them stand out.... They do have red/green left/right navigation lights in them.
N. With so little internal volume, I had to opt for all-wedge 45-degree stairwell leading up to the bridge. I normally prefer a lesser slant (22.5-degree ramp), but there's no room for that in this design.
O. There are two sets of vertically-aimed thrusters along the bottom. This allows for better VTOL capability from a RP perspective. Strangely, I found that the red exhaust still points to the rear of the ship, even if their source blocks are turned down. Looks odd. I hope they fix the visual thrust output vector soon.
3. Since the Leopard CV is coming along so well, I want to do a "Leopard" dropship next. This design will have more internal volume, since it lacks a magnificent tail wing. The wings are just simple extensions of the base plate.
A. I'll probably add not only baseplate wings to correspond with the original Leopard design, but I'll probably also add a second pair of wings above the engines to correspond with the "Mechwarrior Online" redesign. I'm tempted to change the upper wings to being forward-swept. I always liked forward-swept wings. Since there will be two sets of wings, a forward-swept pair won't be so ridiculous. I'm not sure how many people play "Mechwarrior Online", so I wonder if anyone will care that the upper wings are forward-swept. Since the redesign doesn't have a second pair of wings, I'll go for it, as my own design flair.
B. The internal volume should be large enough to contain four separate docking areas of 9x13x9 each. The docking modules will each be enhanced with a vertical line group of 3 docking enhancers.
C. That docking design will require an absolute minimum vertical size of 15 blocks. Since the fins on a Leopard are so stubby, I think this will be perfect. The width will require an absolute minimum width of the main body of 20 blocks. No problem.
D. The nose of the Leopard will be similar to my Leopard CV nose. However, the front of the nose can be lower. The nose tip can probably be one or two meters off the floor of the ship. I'll probably stick to 2 meters, and have two sets of wedges leading up to the flat front part of the nose. Then there will be more wedges along the front, leading up to the tiny pilot slits.
E. I plan to stick with the original small bubble turrets I made for the Leopard CV. However, the art for the Leopard's original turrets show two matching barrels on the turret behind the cockpit (and maybe slightly longer), so I may make a two-beam Leopard bubble turret specifically for the Leopard.
F. The original Leopard design showed angled hull along the sides, narrowing at the top. For StarMade, I'll take a hint from the "Mechwarrior Online" redesign, and make the main body more boxy. That will make things much easier and will allow stuff to actually fit the design.
4. The Union dropship, also from Battletech. This is only in the preliminary outer-hull design stage. I have figured out approximately where the ship core will go at the center of the design, but I will need to work on the surrounding superstructure to both allow RP astronaut navigation around the ship, and adequate systems. By definition, the dropship will be short on weapons, have no shields at first, and no jump drives. In the literature, it has more than twice as much mass as the Leopard, and it looks like it will end up with a lot more internal volume. I have a neat design for using plex door blocks in the landing gear to approximately match the original artists' rendition of the Union with its landing pads deployed. Not quite a good fit, but I got the primary gear moved in, so that the ship is not considered by StarMade to be any wider than it should be. Angled plex door wedge (thank you Schema!) will provide a 45-degree stairwell in each landing foot, to allow planet-side astronauts to walk up into the main ship body without significant jumping skills. Similar to the Clarke, I'll design the ship so that "up and forward" are in the same direction. The battletech universe doesn't have gravity generators, so I'll leave those out unless requested. Even then, it'll only go into the shielded refit.
5. Clarke-based designs. Not even on the drawing board yet....
Battletech data on the Sarna Wiki:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leopard_CV
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leopard
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Union
