Art Thread (Concerns)

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Ford Prefect
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Ford Prefect »

Cut back on the number of weapon greeebles by like ... 90%.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Mobius 1 »

I'm also pretty sure it looks like it's jizzing all over time and space.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by NoXion »

Image

My first attempt at a redesign. The electromagnetic ramscoop seems more appropriately located mostly outside the hull, except for aft where it interacts with the rest of the engineering gubbins in that section. I also added water tanks and cargo modules on the inward-facing hull surfaces. Thoughts?

Oh yeah, scale is 1 metre per pixel.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Ford Prefect »

You really need to ask the question 'what do all these hundreds of turrets achieve'.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by NoXion »

Ford Prefect wrote:You really need to ask the question 'what do all these hundreds of turrets achieve'.
A high rate of fire? :?

Although they're capable of operating extensively on their own, they make good escort vessels for larger craft like interstellar torchships.

As to why it's armed so, the edges of known space after the colonisation of the Solar system but before the construction of wormhole networks, although lacking in hostile alien empires in the typical sense, were nonetheless wild and remote. Such a vessel may be the only significant armed force within a light-year. As such it may be necessary in the circumstances to conduct ground operations should a nearby colony send out a distress signal.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Ford Prefect »

You're thinking like some guy designing a space galleon/elaborate fetish dildo.

What do a billion greebles do which making the skin a phased array and just freeming people with lasers doesn't? As it stands it just ruins the lines and is really awkward looking. The 20th century casemates plastered with a dozen laser emitters and other casemates jutting out of the fuel tanks really aren't helping the design.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Magister Militum »

As to why it's armed so, the edges of known space after the colonisation of the Solar system but before the construction of wormhole networks, although lacking in hostile alien empires in the typical sense, were nonetheless wild and remote. Such a vessel may be the only significant armed force within a light-year. As such it may be necessary in the circumstances to conduct ground operations should a nearby colony send out a distress signal.
True, but does that really necessitate hundreds of guns plastered all over? I mean, what makes more sense, hundreds of guns drawing small amounts of power from the reactors, or a few dozen big guns that can put out far greater yields? If you're worried about high rates of fire, then just go the route Ford suggested in addition to your big guns.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by RRoan »

Penisship 2.0: Now with 100% more Krogan!
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by NoXion »

Ford Prefect wrote:You're thinking like some guy designing a space galleon/elaborate fetish dildo.

What do a billion greebles do which making the skin a phased array and just freeming people with lasers doesn't?
I'll admit that I have an aesthetic preference for clunky, mechanical-looking technology over the smooth shiny iPod-style gee-whiz type stuff. I reckon one could justify that in-universe by saying that such designs are more rugged and easier to repair/replace in the field. Am I wrong in thinking that?
As it stands it just ruins the lines and is really awkward looking. The 20th century casemates plastered with a dozen laser emitters and other casemates jutting out of the fuel tanks really aren't helping the design.
I'm willing to tolerate awkwardness in designs as long as they make some kind of sense and don't look too phallic. If I were to go back to the drawing board on this one, I would keep in mind the following as I did with this design:

1) Three reaction drives - one electromagnetic ramscoop for efficient long-distance interstellar travel, a torch-drive and a backup engine(s). Propellant tanks must be fairly large in relation to the rest of the ship.

2) Support for fighters and landing craft.

3) Habitation volume with rotating sections for when the ship isn't accelerating.

4) Aesthetically, it should be fairly "solid" since it is expected to be able to enter into combat situations. I don't know about you, but spindly or "graceful" warship designs simply don't appeal to me, unless form follows function (for example, a spacecraft that is expected to be able to enter atmosphere).

Perhaps I should experiment.
Magister Militum wrote:True, but does that really necessitate hundreds of guns plastered all over? I mean, what makes more sense, hundreds of guns drawing small amounts of power from the reactors, or a few dozen big guns that can put out far greater yields? If you're worried about high rates of fire, then just go the route Ford suggested in addition to your big guns.
The smaller turrets with the coloured stripes fire projectiles or missiles. Projectiles (which come with their own charge of energy (electrical? chemical? nuclear?), sort of like bullets) are used in situations demanding more volume, while missiles, with their on-board maneuvering and guidance systems, are used for more accurate volleys. For situations requiring a single powerful shot, one of the forward-facing linear accelerators (seen in the image poking out of the hull at the forward end of the ship) is loaded up. Although you can't really see it, the linear accelerators have a longer barrel length than the turret-mounted gauss cannons.

Would be reasonable to suppose that the ramscoop could be used as a weapon? If so, I reckon it could make a pretty powerful one.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

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I think you should be asking questions more along the lines of what enemy are the designers of this ship envisaging as its enemy in-universe, before you fill up the design with a gazillion greebles. 'Cause frankly I'm rather sceptical of an 'interstellar battlecruiser' to begin with, especially if it operates at relativistic velocities, much less one loaded with a ton of different weapons systems instead of a handful of actually effective ones. Modern warships aren't loaded with carronades and 32pdr guns -- they have missiles, missiles and more missiles with a missile-based close-in defense system as a backup. Nobody expects to be using the cannon or for that matter the CIWS chaingun for anything barring last-ditch "fuck we're being boarded by Somalis" situations. I have a hard time imagining that in the future ships will be equipped with half a dozen or more weapons systems essential to combat, instead of one or two actually effective weapons, be they giant spinal-mount ion guns or titanic phased array lasers. And even then you have to ask yourself the question: who's going to outfit a warship that takes a decade to reach the nearest star system, yet can be taken out with one or two lucky shots? Who is the enemy within this setting that you need torchships to combat him?
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

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Siege wrote:I think you should be asking questions more along the lines of what enemy are the designers of this ship envisaging as its enemy in-universe, before you fill up the design with a gazillion greebles. 'Cause frankly I'm rather sceptical of an 'interstellar battlecruiser' to begin with, especially if it operates at relativistic velocities, much less one loaded with a ton of different weapons systems instead of a handful of actually effective ones. Modern warships aren't loaded with carronades and 32pdr guns -- they have missiles, missiles and more missiles with a missile-based close-in defense system as a backup.
Modern warships also have to deal with things like submarines and/or enemies over the horizon, the kind of things which have no real equivalent during the era in which I'm envisioning this spaceraft to have been built.
Nobody expects to be using the cannon or for that matter the CIWS chaingun for anything barring last-ditch "fuck we're being boarded by Somalis" situations.
Considering its intended role, I think the ship is more likely to encounter forces akin to Somali pirates - raiders, private colonists and so forth. At least on the Terran side of things; who knows what idiosyncratic doctrines some millennia-old alien (inter)planetary civilisation could have?
I have a hard time imagining that in the future ships will be equipped with half a dozen or more weapons systems essential to combat, instead of one or two actually effective weapons, be they giant spinal-mount ion guns or titanic phased array lasers.
Really? I don't see how current trends in maritime warfare will necessarily be replicated in space combat.

In any case, as impressive as contemporary 21st-century military technology can be, I find it lacks a certain something that makes battleship-style designs appealing to me. Let's not forget that early 21st century naval technology is mainly built to face a fairly well-known and consistent foe - other professional navies, with technologies similar to one's own. In order for space warships in Nova Mundi to resemble USN warships, the geopolitical situation would have to be similar (also space travel would have to be sufficiently analogous to oceanic travel to make sense). But geopolitically speaking the world of Nova Mundi is a crazily diverse patchwork (or at least I intend it to be), rather than being the battleground for two dichotomously opposed hegemonies (Cold War) or the playground of a prime imperial power (aftermath of Cold War).

I'd like to think that a bunch of angry homesteaders, a warship of an opposing power, and who knows what else, all require responses of varying kind and magnitude. I imagine that if one is designing a ship to assist and protect far-flung starter colonies where support from some kind of home base is difficult or impossible, it will need to be able to deal with as wide a variety of potential hostiles as possible, in contrast to the hyper-optimised kind of vehicles we get today.
And even then you have to ask yourself the question: who's going to outfit a warship that takes a decade to reach the nearest star system, yet can be taken out with one or two lucky shots?
If a system is heavily defended enough to take out a single warship in one or two shots, then that sounds like it would take a major military campaign to dig them out anyway, in which case one would send a fleet of dedicated warships rather than a single patrolling vessel.
Who is the enemy within this setting that you need torchships to combat him?
The enemy may have torchships of their own, at the time the above design was being built torchdrives weren't exactly Lost Technology.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I appreciate the amount of detail that went into the work. But, er. Proportionwise and aestheticswise, festooning every quarter square pseudofathom and paleoleague of your vessel with weapons systems is kind of... eh. You don't see modern warships, or even old warships, bristling with guns at every XYZ paces of hull. Most of their surface area was decidedly non-gun. And besides, normally, for every actual gun barrel or cannon barrel you see there's a larger portion of the ship dedicated to storing ammunition or weapons-operator crews and their targeting systems, and for the actuators that move the gun, etc. So for every weapon, there's a larger portion of the ship that's un-weaponed.

Unless it's one of those 2D space arcade shooter games like Tyrian or something. And so after the Xth level when your plucky space fighter ZIG has had the missiles, pew-pew lasers, and plasma scatter beams, it can take on the giant boss battleship with the biniminillion guns sticking out of it, with each gun/target worth ABCDXYZ-amount of points for the high score.

If you're going with a non-serious approach wherein your giant warship has cartoon-amounts of guns sticking out of it so that it can shoot down swarms of pirates riding giant robots armed with drillbits out to ransack the giant warship and kidnap the hot space princess or steal the invaluable space gold locked within the ship's holds, then I guess that would be cool. It can have flight decks for space fighters so it can also go Tyrian and LAUNCH ZIGs at the CATS attacking it.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by NoXion »

So I went back to the drawing board. THIS is one new direction that has occurred to me. The propellant tanks fore and aft and the water tanks around the outside of the habitation rings also serve as radiation shielding.

It's only a rough draft, but I thought I'd share before I invested too much effort in it.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Arkitek »

That thing down the centre-line looks like its just begging to snap as soon as the main engine fires.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

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Ryan Thunder wrote:That thing down the centre-line looks like its just begging to snap as soon as the main engine fires.
Eh, I can always add some structural thingiemabobs if I decide to finish this draft.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Mobius 1 »

The whole 'too many turrets' applies here, too - especially with the four equal quadrants, you could get away with a design, that while not 'lol apple,' looks a whole of hell lot more streamlined and better.

EDIT: moreover, looking at it again, all those turrets are doubly funny because the entire middle section is a blind spot to the degree of painting a red target on the hull
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Magister Militum »

Yeah, I like this design a lot more than the others.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Arkitek »

NoXion wrote:
Ryan Thunder wrote:That thing down the centre-line looks like its just begging to snap as soon as the main engine fires.
Eh, I can always add some structural thingiemabobs if I decide to finish this draft.
I recommend that it not be much longer than, oh, 10 times its width.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

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Some tentative maps/orbital views I made for a planet in my uni:

Image
North view, Continent 4

Image
South view, Continent 4

The planet is supposed to be sort of like Cretaceous Earth, with a hothouse climate with no polar ice caps and very high sea levels, so that large shallow seas cover much of the continental platforms.

To make these I took some maps of Jaredia's North America and modified them. It already had low sea levels and different ecozones than Earth, so it already had the beginning of an alien look that I could work on and enhance.

I'm not 100% sure the planet will actually look like this in the universe, but I thought what the heck, I made these, why not post them here?
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Zor »

Image

This is a Warspawn 28th Generation Low Intensity Trooper, the basic idea here is the same of an older Drawing of mine for a creature called called a Genetic/Cybernetic Uruk. This one is more refined as a concept. An organism grown under medium (Often in several parts to speed things up) and given cybernetic augmentation, ther ansestors were once created to serve as footsoldiers by another power, that power was destroyed but the creatures lived on.

The 28th Generation of Low Intensity troopers, like their predecessors are a core element in Warspawn formations. They are not the most heavily armed or armored and they have compartively little in the line of augmentation to their bodies. This however means three things...

1-Their harder to track than heavier assault units
2-They are lower maintinence and can operate away from supply lines indefinately if need be
3-They can be produced by basic prefab structures in the field

They are mainly used as scouts, forest combatants, policing (occasionally Warspawn rent out military forces to other powers and they do assist their allies) and in other roles were volume of feet ont the ground is more important than individual prowess. That said, one should not mistake LI Troopers as being incompetant in the field. Millions of skirmishes, campaigns and battles have been studied, evaluated and examined by the Prime Engineers to create a set of seventy eight template personalities for LI Troopers, each of which exceed that given by most special forces training programs. They are also not afraid to take casualties or die. They are not suicidal and will retreat if it is benficial to them, but on the same note they can not be intimidated.

The average LI Trooper is armed with a Beam Carbine, a laser weapon firing 5 megajoule pulses at a rate of 600 pulses per second (the weapon has a variable rate of fire) with a backpack power cell with enough energy for 1,000 pulses (as well as being able to accept smaller 100 pulse power cells). Two 2 megajoule wrist mounted lasers, a long ceramic machette, hand grenades and powerful jaws make up the troopers secondary armament. In addition they are issued gauss sniper and battle rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, flame throwers, grenade launchers. If an arm or leg is lost in battle, they can grow a new one
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Somes J »

Thought I'd post that not that map I made for the "alternate history scenarios world in 2012" thread where I tried to extrapolate what the world of George Orwell's 1984 might look like:

Image

There's a larger version that let's you see detail better but it was too big for the board, I guess. Here's a link to it:

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a24/Ju ... rldmap.jpg

In the map:
Red = Eurasia
Grey = Oceania
Yellow = Eastasia
Pink = Disputed/War Zone (permanent war, constantly shifting zones of control)

Oceania also controls most of the Pacific islands and Antarctica, which you can't see on the map.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Malchus »

StyleComp.jpg
StyleComp.jpg (164.25 KiB) Viewed 25573 times
I've been out of practice in the art department in a while, so I decided to finally get back to drawing. I've also been meaning to revamp my style, so I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.

Only really minor revisions to said style, with the major changes mostly around the head area. I figured it was high time I weaned myself out of my usual sideways-obtuse-angle noses and add a little more detail. Also rounded out the face shape a bit. As you can see, though, my time off has taken a toll on my ability to draw almost half-decent hands. HAAAAAAANNNDDDSSS!!! *shakes fist at sky*

Here's a revamp of Maricar compared with an old drawing of her in my older style. I'll probably redraw most of my characters, including my older ones, in this style.

Thoughts?
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I like the additional details to the face, man. It adds more... description. And makes her look better. :)
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Ford Prefect »

Yeah, the difference is obvious and immediate and really quite good.
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Re: Art Thread (Concerns)

Post by Invictus »

It's a style shift worth investing effort into, I think. The old style can be kept for more 'chibi' drawings.
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