The Terrans

Suicide Junkie · #1 January 7th, 2005, 11:24 PM

What's with the two shield plates facing each other in the center of the ship?

Aiken · #2 January 8th, 2005, 01:28 AM

Quote:

Suicide Junkie said:
What's with the two shield plates facing each other in the center of the ship?

Well, if the first engine will be destroyed in battle, inner armor could protect second engine of explosion consequences.

note on ship: it's a nice one, but due to mirror effect the hull itself seems translucent in some places.

Suicide Junkie · #3 January 8th, 2005, 02:26 AM

Ah, and its probably easier to mass manufacture the rounded plates instead of making a custom one for the middle.

AgentZero · #4 January 8th, 2005, 10:53 AM

Quote:

aiken said:
Well, if the first engine will be destroyed in battle, inner armor could protect second engine of explosion consequences.

note on ship: it's a nice one, but due to mirror effect the hull itself seems translucent in some places.

True, and it also ensures a near miss on one engine pod won't carry through and hit the other one. Mainly though, it's an artistic condideration, it just looks better to have the armor plates in there rather than a big empty space..

Azselendor · #5 January 8th, 2005, 11:32 PM

But what's gonna protect debris from the engines from tearing into the primary hull areas from behind?

AgentZero · #6 January 9th, 2005, 11:13 AM

Why, the brave souls stuck in the engineering section.

It's all about survivability. You design a ship to give the crew the best chance of survival, but when the s*** hits the fan, people are gonna die no matter what you do.

AgentZero · #7 February 19th, 2005, 11:05 AM

Righto, well after a very long time, the Battle Cruiser is now more or less done. I've got a few things to do like stick armour plating around the engines and stick the guns on the thing, but the concept is pretty much there.

Renegade 13 · #8 February 20th, 2005, 02:36 PM

He looks evil

Strategia_In_Ultima · #9 February 21st, 2005, 05:56 PM

Or to serve as partial shield replacements... i.e. no shield generated in those areas, but the hull is polarized/energised/etc. to the same stopping power as the shield, cutting power requirements for the shield.

AgentZero · #10 February 21st, 2005, 09:13 PM

Bit of both, actually, Strategia. On the second page of this thread, a couple posts up from the Cruiser pic there's a description of what the plates are made of.

ZeroAdunn, as is often the case with me, you've given me an idea for the battleship and dreadnought that probably will look nothing like what you had in mind. But thanks anyway!

As for this series appearing in SEV, I wouldn't count on it. For one thing, if it did, me posting it here would be a violation of the NDA, albeit retroactively. Second of all, when it was said that SE5 would handle higher-poly ships at a reduced frame rate, I think we were talking about somewhere in the 2000-3000 range as opposed to the recomended 1000-1500. As it stands, the Dreadnought is probably going to hit 200,000 easily. Which means that 5 DNs would take up the same ammount of poly-crunching power as an 500-ships per side battle using the recomended number of polys. If that same battle were to be played out entirely with DNs, you'd be talking about 200,000,000 polys! I think most computers would have a bit of a problem with that.

And third, Bryce can't export to .X! Auugh! One of these days I'm going to sit down and learn myself a modeller that can, then maybe you'll see these guys in SE5. Any suggestions for a good (ie: easy & cheap/free) modeller that can export to .X?