Imperial 528's Starship Thread [No 56k]

[ShadowDragon8685]

Here's one which I whipped up last night, it's a simple paint scheme, but it's quite bright:


If I could draw I would be able to make a nice custom texture faster, but I'll try despite the time it will take.

Not to some people's aesthetic choices, but I imagine that for the culture that painted that ship, lemon-lime is the harbinger of death, doom, destruction and Amway?

Still, it has the point down - in space, there's no reason not to paint your ship something bright and inspiring. I guess that's the colors of their flag?

[edit]Oh yeah, I see the flag on the front. It is the colors. Nice.

[Imperial528]

Yep, gold and dark-ish green.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

How about these then...

[Imperial528]

I love the one with the desert camo and the one with the red-black stripes.

Also, remember Grahf's battleship? Think you could get a fight animation between mine and his, like what was suggested in that thread?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I have to admit I'm liking the red tiger a lot, looks like he's got all the achievments in MW2 for his guns.

A battle animation like that would be pretty major; lots of stuff flying about, effects to make, turrets to split and rig, and explosions take AGES to get set up and render. And then... who wins?

I'm going to take the models home to my more powerful PCs there, and I'll have a play around to see what is workable. I can barely work with one of the models at a time on my works PC, it's so feeble. Anyway I still want to finish off that fighter for Grahf as well. We'll see...

[Imperial528]

Do you think you could e-mail me a .3ds of the file, and the red-stripe skin? I've always wanted to port my models into a few PC games I have, but converting a .skp to .3ds without the pro version of sketchup is a long and convoluted process which seldom comes out right. Last time I tried it, the program I was going to use to put textures onto the model couldn't even view it.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I cant send the skin as it doesn't exist outside Lightwave, it's a fractal pattern generated by the program using parameters I type in. It's just generated when you render the thing. You should be able to make it yourself in a drawing program though. As for converting it, do what I do and download Sketchup Pro. I didn't buy it, but you get 8 hours of free use of it before it shuts down. I start it up, load the file, export as .3ds and then shut it again. It only takes a minute or two each time, which means it'll last for hundreds of model conversions.

[Imperial528]

It never occurred to me to do that, I didn't know it counted running time. Thanks.

I'll see if I can actually skin it and port it into WarCraft III, I'll post it if I succeed.

[ShadowDragon8685]

The purple blotchy pattern looks really nice, kind of alien. The desert camo and the red tigerstripes, especially the red tiger-stripes, look really, really good.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I'm thinking it might not be a fair fight. Check out the shots below of the Warlord and Grahfs battleship flying about 300m apart. I shrank the Warlord down to the more manageable size of 950m long, which is still a tad larger than the 200m+ ship next to it. I also shrank the guns down to match, and split everything so that I can move the 24 main gun turrets separately. To give it scale I also cut in a load of windows, approximately the same size as the ones on Grahfs ship. Any ideas?

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Um, awesome shots, no doubt. However, I'm not sure if when converting the model the scaling got all wonky. In Sketchup, the ship is around 1300m long.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Well, you know, it's not the size 'o the battleship tha' counts, laddie...


It's the technology level o' the fittin's!


Seriously, on that last one. The smaller ship could easily one-shot a bigger ship if it's technology level is significantly higher. Of course, I presume we're positing equally modern armaments and defensive systems, so... Yeah, that wee little frigate is pocked.


That said, they look good flying together. Why not give them both similar color schemes and add a few more of those frigates as a picket escort?

[Edit]Oh, uh... Whoops, sorry, Grahf. Didn't mean to disparage your battleship by calling it a frigate, I didn't see that bit.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

There is a problem when you import/export from .3ds, the scale goes mental. I think it multiplies it by at least a factor of 10, so when you convert the thing to a new format you either go with published stats for the model, or go by recognisable details which give it scale. One thing that complicates that is peoples unquestioning love of spectacularly enormous ships. If I had kept your original scales the size disparity would be even worse, with Grahfs 4265ft leviathan being dwarfed even more by Imperials 31,496ft long Warlord. It would also make it near impossible to see the scale, since things like windows and hatches would be invisible except in extreme close-up, and I'd be there for days cutting windows in.

As for tech level and comparisons, the guns on Grahfs smaller ship look much more complex than on the Warlord, so my first idea was to go with a tech level disparity. I was thinking the Warlord would be a less complex vessel relying more on huge size, solid armour and lots of guns to intimidate opponents. Grahfs ship would be the more advanced; shielded, intensely powerful guns and rows of missile launch tubes to use as well. It would be a battle of attrition, a question of which would hold up longer, the Warlords armour and many big guns or Grahfs shielding and advanced weapons. It would be a bit like pitting the IJN Yamato against a modern day missile cruiser (with shielding).

[Imperial528]

With the exception being that the Yamato-equivalent in this scenario could very well have enough armor to make the missile cruiser run out of ammunition first. In-universe, at least for my ship, this would make sense, as the race which made this craft and the others I've posted rely more on armor than shielding.

Although, if you really want to know why my designs have been less complex, it's because I figure that if a system is complex, I don't want it exposed to battle damage, which is why the barrels are, well, simple barrels, and the hulls are simple faces. I never understood the use of putting vital gun components on the exterior of the gun, other than for the rule of cool. Unless, of course, your ship is made of cardboard, duck tape, and plywood, so once shields fail any armor is utterly useless anyway and everything is equally dead.

[ShadowDragon8685]

If the weapon systems in play are such that no armor is sufficient - or even capable - to protect you, you might as well forgo all armor above and beyond whatever is postulated as strictly necessary simply for the rigors of space travel and dedicate all that mass into fuel supplies, reactors and shields.

If the weapons you're facing don't operate by directing damage in a linear path between the barrel of the weapon and the target, armor doesn't do you any good. It won't help you against gravitic weapons which will shred and shear the ship (including it's armor) in ways that armor cannot begin to protect against, or Traveller-style meson-decay weapons which just melt the insides without regards to armor. That's when you want a really, really strong unified field. If the enemy has practical and inexpensive teleportation technology, they'll just teleport bombs into your ship's interior - of course, not all shields might help with that, either!

Then again, sometimes weapons do have some direct-fire components to them. Directed energy weapons, non-teleporting torpedoes, kinetic drivers... If they're common enough, you might want some armor just in case.

Ruggedizing your gear is good practice for, say, infantry materiel. But if any damage that gets through the shields is going to swat your ship armor or no, you might as well forgo the armor, strip off the protective weapon barrels, and use the saved mass to improve maneuver capability or heat sinking or something else which will remain relevant.


All depends on the setting, really. And whether or not you've ever found something like that. If you're used to space combat with directed destruction and rely on nice, heavy armor to protect your ships, you're going to be eaten alive when you meet the guys with meson cannons or gravitics that literally tear your ship apart.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

There is no criticism of designs implied in my comments. These ships are designed along different principles, each perfectly correct and consistent with their race's design philosophy. They use different approaches to achieve the same results, as there are always many paths to the same goal. One might use an 18" 3,200lb shell to get the job done, another might use a 200lb shaped charge delivered with exquisite accuracy. You have 40" of ceramic/unobtanium layered armour plate charged with additional structural integrity field generators, while the other ship might have a shield projector mimicing the strong atomic force of weapons grade unobtanium, scanned from a small sample inside the ship and projected as a field several meters from the actual ships hull. The end result will be the same.

The only thing that does bug me with most designs I see is the scale. I've made no secret of the fact that I think many people just make up impressive numbers with no thought to how that might be done. While a 6-mile long ship might theoretically be possible, how many could you build and man? You'd have to melt down the US armed forces to get that much metal, let alone any exotic stuff needed, and even with automation you're going to need a humungous, highly trained crew. An entire planet might be able to make and man a couple of them every ten years for a short period of time, and that would be at a push. You would need a serious galactic empire with a helluva lot of resources and friendly planetary populations to recruit from. Even then do you want your galactic empire patrolled by 5 or 6 humungous ships, or 100's of power battleships of more manageable size? Such a monster might be a one-off flagship, but more a novelty than a serious design strategy.

As for your point about exotic weaponary negating armour, its an argument that's already been played out in the 19th century. It was argued that big guns were becoming so powerful there was no point to armour, so just make light, fast ships instead. It was pointed out that truly enormous, powerful weapons are by their very nature rather rare, and that in most cases armour helps a lot, even if it doesn't outright stop the weapon. The normal design philosophy of battleships and so forth is to design your armour to stand up to guns as large as the ones you're carrying yourself. If someone shows up with some exotic weapon system far beyond your knowledge then you're toast, and there's nothing you could do about it anyway.

[Imperial528]

Well, the current status of the RPG weapons wise is that most everyone relys on brute force, and lots of it. For example, the two most powerful factions in the RPG right now have capital ships of similar size to mine, and they have tens of thousands of them, and those are covered in more guns than I think is practical. (I don't have an exact quote, but I remember one person stating his standard destroyer has hundreds of guns, and standard cap ships have thousands, what I've been unique for is having large ships with a few hard-hitting guns.) I can definitely see where you're coming from about ship sizes, that's why I designed this ship actually, since my current capital ship is so large I won't bother mentioning it, for your sake.

As for exotic weaponry, as I said earlier, every weapon I know of is based on brute force, from lasers to MACs. Most of the research so far in exotic and new weapons is such that these weapons will exist on a few powerful ships. Although, several factions have teleportation, but to my knowledge they are limited to high-ranking individuals.

I am surprised that the GM of the RPG has yet to comment here, I know he's on this forum as well.

[Sky Captain]

While a 6-mile long ship might theoretically be possible, how many could you build and man? You'd have to melt down the US armed forces to get that much metal, let alone any exotic stuff needed, and even with automation you're going to need a humungous, highly trained crew. An entire planet might be able to make and man a couple of them every ten years for a short period of time, and that would be at a push. You would need a serious galactic empire with a helluva lot of resources and friendly planetary populations to recruit from. Even then do you want your galactic empire patrolled by 5 or 6 humungous ships, or 100's of power battleships of more manageable size? Such a monster might be a one-off flagship, but more a novelty than a serious design strategy.

I think you are underestimating the resources an empire spanning thousands of star systems would have at it's disposal. Even a single solar system would have enough raw materials in the form of asteorids and moons to build hundreds of thousands of such giant ships. Suppose all it takes is to send a comand to Von Neuman factories (plausible for galactic scale empire) and few months later you have a fleet ready to go. As far as manning the ships go - there is no reason why they can't be fully automated run by AI's with only few dozen humans aboard just to keep an eye on the systems and intervene if something goes haywire. .

[Imperial528]

That actually reminds me of something. Most of the internal space on my ships are taken up by the reactors, power transmission, computers, supplies, and the hyperdrive system. On my current smallest ship in service (About the same size of an ISD, but thinner), there literally is no room for more than five hundred personnel, unless you transformed cold storage A-E into crew quarters, but that would drastically cut range. All of those systems scale up on larger ships, so expect crew to be low for the size of the design, and I'm trying to cut down on crew requirements anyway. For instance, I designed my light cruiser with a crew of fifty and an AI core or a crew of one hundred and fifty and a lesser AI in mind.

My ships are heavily automated.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

It would indeed take a MASSIVE empire to make this size of stuff, no getting around it. It also takes very complex systems, no doubt some rather rare and exotic materials, and at least some people. There will always be some limiting material factor, and you'd best pick an unihabited system which wont mind being raped of those materials. It would make a nice plot line or choke point in an RPG, having to find, take and hold a system with just the right combination of resources that make it ideal for large scale ship construction.

It would also take very good AI to run robotic factories that can assemble 6 mile long ships and fly them well. Again, real world analogies suggest there are problems with doing so. Highly automated ships and subs are all well and good when they work, but once damaged you find your ship severely undermanned for the task of fighting or repairing it. You would need an army of robots to do the job, and again it comes down to masses of materials to make them and trusting your machine army to do the job correctly and not be turned against you or disabled by a hacker. I think it would come down to a species tech level and tolerance of those risks. Many would end up saying 'sod it' and just manning the things as the easiest and most flexible solution.

As for the 'my ship has a million guns' style of childish thinking, it's clearly nuts as you worked out yourself. A huge ship packing a million small guns meets a huge ship packing 4 guns with 250,000 times the firepower of the other ships weapons = lots of tiny gun parts in orbit around themselves. No contest.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Well, I think you should scale it according to your preference Kenny. Your doing that renderings and animations. I have no stake in it really. I just want to see it blow shit up. I agree that maybe it should be reduced, maybe to 650-700 meters. Considering it is a battleship that would seem a pretty decent size. I would assume that with large engines capable of interstellar flight, large power reactors, redundant reactors and life supports systems and FTL drives would take up a lot of space. My big dreadnought would scale a lot better to Imperial's ship.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

What I can do is scale up yours by removing the windows and when it's larger, cut the windows in again at the right size. More window layers, more decks, larger ship. Then we can try blowing shit up, which is as you rightly say, the whole point of this.

Do you guys have any idea what sort of stuff they're firing, and what that might look like in action?

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Big guns are directed energy weapons I.e. think gundam style mega particle cannon. Small guns are rail guns/coil guns/gauss cannons and missles.

[Imperial528]

My turrets are plasma cannons, basically turbolasers, green bolts and all that. The four big guns on the hull are ion beams, so they'd be blue-tealish. Out of the twelve smaller hull mounted guns, four (the larger ones, with the smaller ones to the sides) of them are lasers, basically those would appear as a red flash on the other ship's hull/shield, and then the damage would be done if it penetrates. The remaining eight guns are plasma beams, and they are also green.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

As for who wins, I will throw this out there. An episode of B5 has a Narn warship parked in front of the station. A centauri ship jumps in and they duke it out. The centauri makes the kill but is destroyed while jumping out do to extensive damage. It seems a good compromise if your worried about damaging egos. Hell, you could have mine being run over for all I care just as long as it looks cool.