frigates and destroyers...

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Sat Mar 13, 2004 1:37 am

This is my first post here - I recently downloaded VS and have been working in Wings3D to try and create my own vessels.

Recently I've been toying with various ideas for frigates and other small warships, and this is one of my favorite designs so far...

Note that I can't directly link to the image itself. Village Photo's
free service won't allow that ...

it's at http://www.villagephotos.com/pubbrowse. ... ted=814693

I have yet to texture it, btw, but I have been practicing texturing in the GIMP....

-- Crotalid

Post by **hurleybird** » Sat Mar 13, 2004 1:38 am

the fullsized image wont load, but the thumbnail looks pretty nice.

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Sat Mar 13, 2004 1:47 am

Hmm ... try http://www.villagephotos.com/image.asp?id_=8228833 then. That's a direct link to the picture...

I'm not sure why it wouldn't work, it works fine for me.

-- Crotalid

Post by **hurleybird** » Sat Mar 13, 2004 1:54 am

Use from this location denied. Referrer is

you can upload it to the VS picture gallery if you wish.

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Sat Mar 13, 2004 2:14 am

you can upload it to the VS picture gallery if you wish.

Done. It's at http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... ate_design

Thanks.

-- Crotalid

Post by **hurleybird** » Sat Mar 13, 2004 2:17 am

I like the design.

It strikes me as a small cap ship, and a newer design.

Good luck with the texturing!

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Mar 14, 2004 6:32 pm

nice ship, can't wait to see it completed!

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 2:19 am

Here's what I have so far, with the texturing...
I think I may add another layer over the main plating-effect layer, to add subtle detail. That, and I need to add windows to it...

Post by **hurleybird** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 2:26 am

wow thats looking great!

keep up the great work. Cant wait to see the finished product. We could really use better cap-ship models in VS.

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 3:09 am

wow thats looking great!

keep up the great work. Cant wait to see the finished product. We could really use better cap-ship models in VS.

Thanks. I'm going to have to get rid of the edges there, so it doesn't look strange.

BTW the 6 holes visible near the bow, on the underside, are supposed to be missile launcher tubes. The faintly visible blue spots on the top of the ship are marked for turrets (10 of them in all).

As for the stats of the ship, I am thinking about giving it a mass of about 2 million tons, an armor value of 6400 all around, and a shield value of about 12000-15000 or so.

Its armament might consist of the 12 torpedo tubes, plus the 10 turrets (heavy ones, I figure), in addition to a handful of forward-mounted guns or beams in the bow. Additional weapons could be fit in the protrusion under the bridge tower, too.

Also - I agree with you on the CapShip issue. Not only could we use better models, but more models would be good, too, I think. More diverse CapShips, even...

-- Crotalid

Post by **hurleybird** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 3:41 am

Cool. The turrets remind me of the destroyer from homeworld 2. However, for those turrets to be really effective the ship would need to turn and bring all of the turrets to bear on a target. Ships like this might need a bit of an adjusted AI to do this.

Post by **jackS** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 8:03 am

Crotalid wrote: Thanks. I'm going to have to get rid of the edges there, so it doesn't look strange.

BTW the 6 holes visible near the bow, on the underside, are supposed to be missile launcher tubes. The faintly visible blue spots on the top of the ship are marked for turrets (10 of them in all).

As for the stats of the ship, I am thinking about giving it a mass of about 2 million tons, an armor value of 6400 all around, and a shield value of about 12000-15000 or so.

Its armament might consist of the 12 torpedo tubes, plus the 10 turrets (heavy ones, I figure), in addition to a handful of forward-mounted guns or beams in the bow. Additional weapons could be fit in the protrusion under the bridge tower, too.

Also - I agree with you on the CapShip issue. Not only could we use better models, but more models would be good, too, I think. More diverse CapShips, even...

-- Crotalid

Don't worry about computing mass. We have scripts to do this based on the model.

Please refrain from putting large numbers of windows on military capital vessels. Large civilian ships may be equipped for sightseeing, but the military has no use for aesthetics that detract from survivability.

Likewise, having a "bridge tower" that actually functions as such is a rather poor design decision. The bridge would much more likely be located beneath such an armored protrusion than hung out on a pole waiting for someone to pleasantly decapitate the command and control of the vessel.

Placing all of the turrets on the top leads to rather horrible blind spots. If you desire the vast bulk of your weapons to be top mounted, consider having missile launching tubes on the top, as the ability of the missiles to maneuver relieves the ship from having to do all the maneuvering.

If you have a particular vessel from the ships list that you desire this model to become, I'll be perfectly happy to discuss details (of which almost none appear yet in the ships list because I've been too busy writing survey papers on such wonderful topics as "failure detection in distributed systems" bleh. Not entirely my cup of tea.) pertaining to that particular vessel.

Your artwork quality is quite nice, and I look forward to seeing this and other such models make their way into the game.

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 7:39 pm

Don't worry about computing mass. We have scripts to do this based on the model.

Please refrain from putting large numbers of windows on military capital vessels. Large civilian ships may be equipped for sightseeing, but the military has no use for aesthetics that detract from survivability.

Likewise, having a "bridge tower" that actually functions as such is a rather poor design decision. The bridge would much more likely be located beneath such an armored protrusion than hung out on a pole waiting for someone to pleasantly decapitate the command and control of the vessel.

Placing all of the turrets on the top leads to rather horrible blind spots. If you desire the vast bulk of your weapons to be top mounted, consider having missile launching tubes on the top, as the ability of the missiles to maneuver relieves the ship from having to do all the maneuvering.

If you have a particular vessel from the ships list that you desire this model to become, I'll be perfectly happy to discuss details (of which almost none appear yet in the ships list because I've been too busy writing survey papers on such wonderful topics as "failure detection in distributed systems" bleh. Not entirely my cup of tea.) pertaining to that particular vessel.

Your artwork quality is quite nice, and I look forward to seeing this and other such models make their way into the game

LOL I had a feeling I would hear an objection to the bridge tower...
and actually now that I think about it, I agree. I will see what I can do as far as a redesign. I was actually thinking of making two large (read: heavily armored) protrustions, on top and bottom, both of the same size and design, to serve as weapons platforms. This would allieviate the problem of having so few places to mount weapons on such a linear ship design like mine. I may get rid of the turrets too. Or at least spread them around, perhaps.

As for the windows - I hadn't planned on putting alot in. Maybe an observation deck though...

Also, how is ship mass calculated? Is my estimate of 2 million metric tons too large for a frigate??

-- Crotalid

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 9:31 pm

Instead of trying to modify that previous design, I decided to start on a new ship, since that is a bit easier. After about an hour of tinkering, this is what I came up with...

It only has 303 poly's... so far, that is.

-- Crotalid

Post by **hellcatv** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 5:04 am

I liked the old one too

at least send it to us in case we need something sometime

D · Post by D » Tue Mar 16, 2004 5:07 am

What size texture map do you use to texture models?

DirtyMagic · Post by **DirtyMagic** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 5:45 am

LOL I had a feeling I would hear an objection to the bridge tower..

They both look pretty good. The first one looks pretty elegant. If you want to save it, you could maybe tweak it a bit so that the tower doesn't look quite so "bridgey". Maybe use it as a platform for turrets or techish greebles?

Post by **hellcatv** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 6:09 am

512x512 or 1024x1024

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 8:19 am

What size texture map do you use to texture models?

I use 2048x2048 maps...

-- Crotalid

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 8:29 am

I use 2048x2048 maps...

-- Crotalid

Crap. I meant to login before posting that.

I use the 2048x2048 maps because I have enough memory to work with several layers at once, even at that resolution (512MB). It lets me work with more detail too...

512x512 or 1024x1024

hellcatv: Was that a question or statement?

-- Crotalid

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 9:50 am

They both look pretty good. The first one looks pretty elegant. If you want to save it, you could maybe tweak it a bit so that the tower doesn't look quite so "bridgey". Maybe use it as a platform for turrets or techish greebles?

I'll see what I can do with both it and the newer design... I also made a version of it (the newer one) without the extentions to the wings, with only the stubby boxlike weapons batteries on either side of the aft hull.
It looks pretty cool, and sort of reminds me of Star Wars-type vessels.

-- Crotalid

Post by **hellcatv** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 12:04 pm

2048x2048 is fine

and players with cards that can't handle it can set a lower max texture size

the more detail the better I guess

you aren't going to find too many cards supporting higher textures--but best to have theart at high rez for the time when that technology becomes useful

Crotalid · Post by **Crotalid** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 12:48 pm

2048x2048 is fine and players with cards that can't handle it can set a lower max texture size
the more detail the better I guess

you aren't going to find too many cards supporting higher textures--but best to have theart at high rez for the time when that technology becomes useful

I considered using 4096x4096 texture maps, but they are just rediculously large lol ... 48MB per image layer makes for very slow texture creation...

Still, I do have a 128MB GeForce4 5200 on this system, so I can handle most graphical demands... but 4k by 4k is just a major pain-in-the-ass to work with. Of course, that really only taxes RAM, not the video card itself....

2048x2048, on the other hand, is pretty good. If need more detail I can always split up the model into more than 1 object, and give each a seperate texmap......

-- Crotalid

Post by **hellcatv** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 8:58 pm

sounds good
my understanding of the ATI radeon series is that they enforce a 2048x2048 limit due to their 24 bit crap floating point

MACK · Post by **MACK** » Tue Apr 13, 2004 4:45 am

the rist one looks like the leangth of it could be a big super cannon. have a few anti fighter turrets and flack cannons but the real power would be in the main mega gun. this ship would be slow not very manuverable leaving it open for other cap ships to rip apart but if it get you in its sights LOOK OUT.

the second one could be a small cap ship. built as escorts for the first ship. on Cannon ship along with two escorts to keep other cap ships off would be a killer combo.

also. placing all your turrets on the top or bottom is not such a bad idea. it depends on what its used for. most of the heavy guns were placed on the bottom of Star destroyers (star wars) to be used for planitary bombardment. thats how Home One lasted so long at the battle of endor. it was not receaving the brunt of the star desroyers firepower.

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frigates and destroyers...

frigates and destroyers...

big gun ship