unwitnessed kilrathi capships:

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Which of these schemes do you like best?

#1:
Image

#2:
Image

#3:
Image

#4:
Image

#5:
Image

#6:
Image

#7:
Image

...or, other ideas welcome.
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Post by starlord »

7 is good: I like the colors.

Besides, I was referring to space race regarding the glorified appollo/soyouz age (docking knob on the cutter).
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Post by Dilloh »

Isn't the Cutter class an "old" design? (from WCMovie or so?)

If it is, I'd favor a purist color scheme fitting adequately into the timeline - a refit/MK2 could have more paintings then.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

starlord wrote:7 is good: I like the colors.
I like that one best, myself.
Besides, I was referring to space race regarding the glorified appollo/soyouz age (docking knob on the cutter).
Ah, I get you now.
Dilloh wrote:Isn't the Cutter class an "old" design? (from WCMovie or so?)
No; it's meant to look like an old design, but it's new; my sources of inspiration were the Venture, Gilgamesh, Drayman, etc.
If it is, I'd favor a purist color scheme fitting adequately into the timeline - a refit/MK2 could have more paintings then.
Hmm... Not sure what you mean by "purist", but I'm trying to follow the CW1 paint styles and traditions, which call for a lot of green, and bits of yellow and red; and blue sometimes. I'm certainly not trying to please my own taste here :D

http://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wc1gettysburg.shtml

Here's another possibility:

Image

I left those squares on the docking bare metal to put Confed logos on them, in the texturing.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Finished a few more details inside the front docking area,

Image

And I wanted to take a shot from a far distance, with a lot of zoom:

Image

Sorry this is going so slowly; I keep updating the unwrapping tutorial,
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... rapBlender
and as I do, I put down a lot of advice; and after I put down the advice, I follow it myself, and it definitely works. I just found about 300 blotched normals and fixed them. May sound like a big number, but the thing is, the ship is already 10 thousand polygons, so finding 300 small ones with their normals backwards is not hard. The good thing is that I found them. Those are kinds of things you might not even consciously notice in a model but create a general feeling of "missing quality somewhere".
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

New paint scheme. Some details gained greeness; the "wings" lost it.
How about it?

Image

Image

Image

I like it *much* better, myself...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Been fixing a lot of little snafus even as I place seams for the unwrap... merging unnecessary vertices, turning triangle pairs into quads, fixing blotched normals, fixing material misassignments... as well as paint job details. So I got curious to see how all those little fixes are panning out in the overall look...


Image

Image


And there's probably going to be a lot more cleaning up along the way to starting to unwrap.
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Post by Kangaroo »

You know what I was thinking? Maybe you could bake the atmospheric effects using procedurals with orco coords, and baking them into a texture, and that way atmos would be unique for each material. I'm not sure it's possible or necessary, though.

btw, don't you have inverted nornals here?
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/2990/cutter43qd0.jpg
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Kangaroo wrote:You know what I was thinking? Maybe you could bake the atmospheric effects using procedurals with orco coords, and baking them into a texture, and that way atmos would be unique for each material. I'm not sure it's possible or necessary, though.
I don't quite understand... What do you mean by "atmos"? You mean like airmarks? That's possible. Someone at Blenderartists took my Demon WIP, a few months ago, and placed objects near the ship, and baked an ambient occlusion, resulting in like smoke-marks...
btw, don't you have inverted nornals here?
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/2990/cutter43qd0.jpg
Hahaha, thanks Pete no; but I panicked when I saw that, myself. It's just an optical illusion: You'd think you're seeing the hull behind the box, through the (missing) box's wall, but what you're really seeing is the planks, the walkway, which goes from one box to another, and is at the level of the top of the box.
I shouldn't have posted that shot... Here:

Image

Good eye! :)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

As I said earlier, writing a tutorial was going to slow down the work, but at least the editorial (on UV-unwrapping) is getting done...
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... rapBlender
...and it's kind of forcing me to proceed very methodically and thoroughly.

And so it was I had to face to the fact that the scaffolds were very unfinished, and the original idea of putting lights there was not done either; --and that I'd better do these things before starting to unwrap. I just finished the bottom side:


Image


Image


The unwrapping seams are all in place already, tho.

The good thing about self-illumination is that it costs nothing at all at runtime; all the local lights's contributions will be baked into the light map, or "glow texture". It takes quite a while to compute the bake (probably a few hours of computer time for this ship, I'm just guessing), but no performance impact at runtime. The lights' specular reflections won't be in-game, tho; only the diffuse contribution.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^ -.-^ nice.


^- - ^ Thinking about how the split platform could work with both vertical units having the same 'up' prompted me to do a sketch.
Image The floor and ceiling of the 'lift' tilt in paraell keeping the top and bottom platforms vertical while keeping mechanical complexity (vulnerability to platform breakage) to a minimum while maximizing human factors (opportunity for stupidity).
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hey, snow_Cat! Glad you like. Got another pic here; I was going to edit the post to add it,

Image

I understand your mechanical concept, but I don't get where you were thinking of applying it... The scaffolds don't move; they are fixed. Or are you suggesting that they should? The only moving parts on the ship, so far, are the turrets, the tractor beams (on bottom turret), the ship arresters (the things that look like "legs"), and the boarding tube (the yellow cylinder at the bottom). And I'm not sure yet what it's going to take to make all these things move, programming-wise.

EDIT:
Finished the top part.


Image


Finally I can start unwrapping...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Eh?! What's a Cutter doing near Achilles mining base?!

Image

Image

Image

Don't worry, that's not a real texture; just a quick test. But anyhow, good enough, I'd say, that maybe others can start playing around with the ship, --adding weapons, fixing scaling, adding docking ports, etceteras-- while I keep working on a real unwrapping and texturing.

Hold on, let me upload the files; give me 5 minutes...

Here we go:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/Cutter/cutter.zip

(Click on this pic below for full size version.)
Image
Well, texture-wise it's a disaster, of course. The unwrapping was done by an automatic script that doesn't respect the most basic rules of proper UV unwrapping, and that's not really a texture at all. Never used a brush even once; just a blending of Blender bakings for materials, ambient occlusion, and a quick and dirty radiosity bake. Nothing drawn or painted by hand at all; a two hour job. Okay, make that 12 hours, but anyhow; this doesn't even scratch what the real texturing will be.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Another couple of large, in-game shots:


Image


Image


Funny the way some people get caught up on the poly-count
scare-mongering... Here's 40 k tris and the framerate is perfectly smooth
for me. In fact, it's so smooth it seems real. If you like the pics, give it a
try in-game and you'll see. Instructions for how to do it are in the
readme.txt, in the zip file: cutter.zip.

Image

Unfurnished flat...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Here's a units.csv that includes the Cutter:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/Cut ... ts.csv.zip
You need Priv1.2 with Dillo's PU pack Special Edition and Targ's heavy turret pack. And of course the Cutter itself:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/Cutter/cutter.zip
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Post by targ collective »

And so the Heavy (and Autotracking; don't forget the Autotracking) Turrets and Bugfix Pack becomes mainstream.

I could almost - [*sob*] - cry...
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Post by Dilloh »

@chuck
Would you like to see this baby in PU permanently?

Just tell me which faction(s) you'd like to have it for, if I should lock it into a campaign, also you can give me a brief concept for a campaign storyline.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hey, sure; I'd be glad to see it used. I think it'd be primarily a Confed ship... or, not quite...

Ok, background Part 1 --the Real story of the Cutter's requirements:
  • Shissui needed a ship capable of exploring systems ahead of carrier that's lost its way home within Kilrah, and supposedly..
  • to accompany, protect (escort) this badly damaged and helpless carrier
  • but later he seemed to have (expanded/changed?) its requirements for its carrying non-jump-capable fighters across jump points, so as to serve as "power projection" to a carrier-based fleet.
  • I needed a cargo ship, because Privateer Chen would be sent to meet the above carrier (after his getting caught in McAuliffe at the time of the first kitty invasion, in 2634), he'd be sent carrying a big load of supplies, to meet that carrier. So, I needed a ship that could be a good transport, as well as being a micro-carrier of sorts; Plus,
  • I needed for Chen to have bought it by the end of Privateer Zero, which means that the ship should have somehow entered the civilian market. And finally,
  • WC0/Priv0 needed some way to retcon its "disappearing" (or nearly so) by the time WC1 begins...
So I searched the usual WC websites for a corvette that might have existed 15 years before WC1's time, and all I could come up with was the Venture Class corvette; which isn't really a corvette (too small), nor is it a good transport (rather thin), nor is it apparently capable of carrying and launching fighters, and from all apparances it's a light but fast ship designed to operate alone, rather than as carrier escort. In other words, the Venture is a "cutter", not a "corvette"; so I had to come up with my own corvette, so I figured might as well call it "Cutter" :D :D :D

Part 2 --the WCU story behind it:

The way I envision it, theis would be a "HumVee" parallel: In pre-war times, or during the Pilgrim War, too many of these babies were produced.
"Feature creep" had made the ship a monstruosity by design: Large cargo hold, and ability to carry its own escorts, so as to serve as supply line to carriers into enemy space (where no Drayman could venture), PLUS being able to "take heat away" from a (delicate) carrier in battle, made the ship heavy and slow, but worst of all, expensive to manufacture. So, after the Pilgrim War, Confeds began to moth-ball them, recycle them, or sell them to civilians or to other Confederation member nations.

There's canon references, much later in WC, of Border Worlds having a big number of "old Cutters" they obtained from the Confed, so I figured that might be part of the retcon for where did these ships end up after WC0.

The size of it is 120 meters long. I envisioned it as the Confed's equivalent of the Khamek: above average strength and firepower, max speed (afterburner) actually not too bad, like about 250; cruising speed of about 190; but very slow turning and acceleration.

It also has "legs" underneath, which I put there for the ship to serve as an assault ship: The "feet" being grapples that grab onto a larger enemy ship; so then it lowers its belly close to the target, and the yellow tube under it telescopes out, making sealed contact with the surface. Cutting lasers drill a hole through the target's armor, then a hatch opens inside and marines go through and board the target. It also has tractor beams below and at the front, but the tractor beams at the time the ship was designed were much lower power; not enough to immobilize a larger ship.

It has 5 docking points, which I originally thought would be big enough for either a heavy fighter or two light fighters, each; but I'm not sure the tunnels are big enough for heavy fighters: Not quite 7 meters high, and not quite 12 meters wide.

I have the scaling factor at 2.0 in units.csv, which I'm not sure it's what it's supposed to be. I was working in Blender at a scale of 5 meters to a unit, so the scaling should be 5, really; as Vegastrike engine tradition is to regard the unit as 1 meter...

Here's a picture I have of an accidental (inter-penetrating) collision with a Drayman:

Image

Image

Apparently either the Drayman's scale is wrong, or the Cutter's, as the Drayman is supposed to be just short of 90 meters long, versus 120 for the Cutter.
As a side-remark: I have like ten times the hull strength of the Drayman in units.csv, but after the above collision, the Drayman had only lost its shields, whereas I had severe hull and armor damage... :-/

Not sure how big Perry is supposed to be, but I was trying to park inside...

Image

Image

Image

... and it proved a tight fit. The ship's width, by the way, according to my calculations, is 110.70110701107011070110701107011 meters.

Cargo arrying capacity I have at 100,000, or 10x as much as the Drayman, since the ship is not only a good 35% longer, but also has a fat body, compared to a Drayman, and fighters actually take up half the "cargo" volume.

Let's see if it makes any sense: The radius of the body is about 20 meters, 20^2=400, times pi = say 1200 m^2 section, times about100 meters long is 120,000 cubic meters; but since the fighters take up "cargo volume", the dockings should apparently be included in the volume calculation; so it works out pretty well, I'd say.

Weapons:

This is something I know not much about. Right now I have 4 turrets of the "heavy laser autotracking" kind that Targ just released. My original intent was to have lasers at the front and flak at the back. Also, the wing-mounted guns I thought could be ultra-heavy, capship grade mass drivers. There's 4 missile launchers on the sides, which presently happen to hold 13 missiles each (units.csv data copied originally from the Khamek). And I was thinking 4 torpedos could round it out.

So, anyways, if you could keep the background story to it more or less what I just described (very old, slow accel, very expensive (10x price of a Drayman), and only available to civilians with a Confed clearance), I'd appreciate it. And thanks for the interest.

EDIT:
Oh, yeah, by the way: Part of my retcon for their disappearing and to kind of force Chen to go to McAuliffe, was that, as much as Confed had been trying to get rid of Cutters in the Post-Pilgrim Ware/Pre-War years, by 2634 they suddenly need them back, and Chen hears from a reliable source that the Confed will soon officially declare war on Kilrah, and once they do so, they will "borrow back" (confiscate) any Cutters that are privately owned, UNLESS, that is, those private owners are already serving the Confed exclusively. So Chen has to start taking up missions for the Confed in a hurry to ensure his ship is not taken away, and they send him to McAuliffe.
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Post by targ collective »

If you'd like, I could create some capship weapons for main guns. True capship weapons should really be different to standard guns in appearance. You might want to model some new capship guns of laser through fusion types. I'll make the changes 'hidden' in the next release of the pack; master_parts_list will remain the same but the new weapons can be there for you to hack into units.csv.

Then again, maybe you know enough to do that before the next release - in fact if you're handy with mountpoints creating the new weapon types may well be child's play for you.

Well, whatever - if you want anything, just holler.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

That'd be AWSOME! I Love You! (No, not that way.) :)
Yeah, cap-ship sized fixed-mount guns are *really* badly needed.
In fact, the role of corvettes is basically to take on bigger fish than themselves (the opposite of destroyers, "destroyer" being a shortened version of the original term "torpedo boat destroyer"); and corvettes, being slow at turning, the only reason why they'd have fixed, forward guns would be, precisely, for cap-ship attack; while the turrets are for defense/"point defense".

Corvettes, of all ships, should therefore have disproportionately heavy forward guns, almost cruiser-sized guns. I'd imagine a similar line of weapon types (laser, meson, mass-driver, ... plasma) with similar characteristics but scaled up, like 4x damage, 1/2 firing rate, same bolt speed, same range or a bit higher.

OT: Do you have a vision for your heavy turret's meshes? In WC traditions there are single, dual and triple gun turrets. I was working on a mesh for the (ultra-heavy) triple-gun, main turret for the Bengal Carrier, which I could easily modify for dual and single gun, heavy turret versions.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 4495#74495
/OT
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Post by targ collective »

I'm not sure how the turret mount system works, so creating new mounts for different types of turrets is a matter I must leave in doubt for now.

Just give me the turret meshes and the figures where to put the guns and I'll work something out. I just crunch numbers and such - it's modellers like you who have vision. Just have fun building them and give me what I need to implement them.

You can make the capship guns as big, bad and ominous looking as you like, but for now the actual weapons you'll be using are the same as the weapons the turrets do - double range, double damage, double drain. If you really want special corvette weapons I could probably accomodate you; I don't know enough about weapon_list.xml to change weapon appearances, mind. Give me the exact ratios you want please. And I can't guarantee the corvette-class weapons appearing in PU (hey, I can't even guarantee my turrets pack coming through unchanged - all I can say for sure is they'll use the bugfixes).
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Okay, give me a couple of days (to a week); I don't even remember what I was at, with that turret, and what you really need, at the moment, are single gun versions, right? (Or are they dual? The mesh you're using has two barrels, but I think it shoots single bolts...) So I'll have to come up with a single gun mod of that mesh, plus UV map, and textures; and then get it into bfxm format... That's gonna take time. Plus, I'd need different gun meshes for the various gun types, right? It's gonna take some time.

In the meanwhile, you could do the fixed gun heavy varieties in units.csv.

I have models I once made for Privateer guns...

Image

Maybe I can modify them a bit and use them for both: turret subunits and heavy forward guns.
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Post by Dilloh »

chuck wrote:Hey, sure; I'd be glad to see it used. I think it'd be primarily a Confed ship... or, not quite...
Not to repost the whole story, but I have additional concepts to propose (just tell what you think). The design doesn't fit into the 2669 confed design, it rather looks like a tarsus-design, even oldschool:
- A capship for the Exploratory Service - they often have to explore deep space territory, facing pirates and cats. They cannot always launch from bases, so they need a somewhat mobile base.
- A Hunter / MercGuild Capship - for small cooperations of Mercenaries.
- A(nother) militia capship?
chuck wrote:Not sure how big Perry is supposed to be, but I was trying to park inside...
I say: forget about Perry's scaling. Looking at the Perry landing pad, you see different "cells" where the ships are standing. Watching the Perry model in space, you must realize that those cells need to be either in the lower hangar or in the upper docking zone. Since you can assume at least 20 cells, I just consider Perry out of scale - so I do with NC btw. Perry is not a reasonable size comparison. (Whew, now I have proven that size DOES matter!)
chuck wrote:So, anyways, if you could keep the background story to it more or less what I just described (very old, slow accel, very expensive (10x price of a Drayman), and only available to civilians with a Confed clearance), I'd appreciate it. And thanks for the interest.
I'll do my best :D
chuck wrote:Oh, yeah, by the way: Part of my retcon for their disappearing and to kind of force Chen to go to McAuliffe, was that, as much as Confed had been trying to get rid of Cutters in the Post-Pilgrim Ware/Pre-War years, by 2634 they suddenly need them back, and Chen hears from a reliable source that the Confed will soon officially declare war on Kilrah, and once they do so, they will "borrow back" (confiscate) any Cutters that are privately owned, UNLESS, that is, those private owners are already serving the Confed exclusively. So Chen has to start taking up missions for the Confed in a hurry to ensure his ship is not taken away, and they send him to McAuliffe.
I could set up a campaign where you help a pilgrim against confed opression, gaining his ship as a final reward. I've seen the movie and think this is still reasonable in 2669, what do you think?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Dilloh wrote:
chuck wrote:Hey, sure; I'd be glad to see it used. I think it'd be primarily a Confed ship... or, not quite...
Not to repost the whole story, but I have additional concepts to propose (just tell what you think). The design doesn't fit into the 2669 confed design, it rather looks like a tarsus-design, even oldschool:
EXACTLY! So glad you see it that way. That is precisely what I intended, though it never occurred to me it looked like a Tarsus; but it's true...
- A capship for the Exploratory Service - they often have to explore deep space territory, facing pirates and cats. They cannot always launch from bases, so they need a somewhat mobile base.
Excellent idea. It could help them speed up the work.
In my Privateer Analysis brainstorming I came to the conclusion that exploratory equipment is highly classified and restricted, and fetches huge amounts of money in the black market, so pirates are always looking out for ES ships and equipment. The computational power to do the regression from "antigraviton drift measurements" to yield jump point positions is enormous, requiring a supercomputer. That's why Burrows, while working for the ES, must return to base after exploring each new system. The supercomputer at the base determines from the field measurements where the jump points are, and the coords are then uploaded to Burrows' ship's nav computer. Slow process. But if a ship is tough and well defended, like the Cutter, then it merits the risk of putting the supercomputer in it.
- A Hunter / MercGuild Capship - for small cooperations of Mercenaries.
Sure. One must keep in mind, though, that by 2669 there's been a revolution in jump drive miniaturization. The first jump-capable smaller ships in WC appear in the 2660's, and the majority of them towards the end of the 2660's. So, back in the 2630's, 40's and 50's, there was a huge necessity for bigger ships with jump capability that could carry smaller ships across jump-points. By 2669, that requirement is getting erased, except for the fact that there are still a lot of older fighters that can't be or won't be refitter, such as Talons. But Demons are jump-capable, so I see more of a pressing need for militias using Cutters...
On the other hand, non-jump-capable fighters will always be either better armed and/or more nimble than a similar fighter having a jump drive, so having a bigger ship that carries smaller ships will always make at least some sense. The trick is to be sure to use the Drayman or Cutter efficiently by favoring non-jump capable craft for its escort. Something for that mass rebalance to chew on...
- A(nother) militia capship?
Or how about THE militia capship? After all, militias get their ships from Confed Decomissionings, and the Cutter is a war-ship, in fact. The Confeds have a version of Drayman, but it doesn't even resemble the civilian Draymans we see in Privateer. So IMO it would make more sense for hunters to use Draymans, and for militias to use Cutters (and/or WC1 style Draymans). (I'd like to jump to this opportunity, though, to insist that a Drayman doesn't have the room to carry AND launch more than 3 small fighters, like Talons. And the DraymanCVL should use a modified mesh that shows the launching/landing docks, by the way. I could come up with one if someone has the original mesh. Mesher can't seem to convert its .bfxm back to .obj, for some reason... Ehm, never mind; it's probably in the WCU shippack; I'll have a look tonight.)

But then comes the question of which militias. Somewhere in the WC literature there's references to there being two kinds: Local Militias, that work for local governments (at system or base level) and Confed Militias that operate quadrant-wise, checking for smugglers and all that. The local militias are often shoe-string budget, and don't fly much better tin cans than Talons, and they may take jobs on the side, like when Lynn Murphy (a Merchants Guild exec, really; ex-militia) gets you two militia escorts for the final Palan mission. Only Confed militias should have Cutters, and then only 1 or 2 in all of Gemini, and only use them in rare occasions. Those occasions would involve fighting Retros, rather than pirates, tho; as Confed Militias don't really have a mandate to fight pirates, IMO.
I believe the militias usually have Paradigms stationed around NC, --or was that only in WCU?--; so perhaps they could have a Cutter or two often stationed around NC, instead. Paradigms are destroyers, for carrier escorting roles; they'd never end up in Militia hands.
chuck wrote:Not sure how big Perry is supposed to be, but I was trying to park inside...
I say: forget about Perry's scaling. Looking at the Perry landing pad, you see different "cells" where the ships are standing. Watching the Perry model in space, you must realize that those cells need to be either in the lower hangar or in the upper docking zone. Since you can assume at least 20 cells, I just consider Perry out of scale - so I do with NC btw. Perry is not a reasonable size comparison. (Whew, now I have proven that size DOES matter!)
100% agreed.
chuck wrote:Oh, yeah, by the way: Part of my retcon for their disappearing and to kind of force Chen to go to McAuliffe, was that, as much as Confed had been trying to get rid of Cutters in the Post-Pilgrim War/Pre-War years, by 2634 they suddenly need them back, and Chen hears from a reliable source that the Confed will soon officially declare war on Kilrah, and once they do so, they will "borrow back" (confiscate) any Cutters that are privately owned, UNLESS, that is, those private owners are already serving the Confed exclusively. So Chen has to start taking up missions for the Confed in a hurry to ensure his ship is not taken away, and they send him to McAuliffe.
I could set up a campaign where you help a pilgrim against confed opression, gaining his ship as a final reward. I've seen the movie and think this is still reasonable in 2669, what do you think?
Most certainly. And indeed, most Pilgrims who haven't fled Confed space altogether, are mostly the ethnic group that characterizes Border Worlds, according to my speculations and backgrounding for Priv3; and Border Worlds supposedly got a good number of Cutters from the Confed, as a matter of actual WC canon (though those Cutters are never described or shown). So, it fits perfectly. Could you set this campaign in Border Worlds? (Or starting there?)
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
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Post by targ collective »

Chuck, if you throw me the figures you want for your capship guns I can get a modified units.csv to you tomorrow. Using the existing weapon skins, true, but still tomorrow. Or you can wait until the look is right; it's all the same to me. But let me know for sure, please, when you want them.
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