Ship Dockscreen Images (WIP)

[Cirevam]

I'll keep it short: As I started modeling the interior of the Wolfen, someone on IRC suggested I make custom ship dockscreen images from what I'll eventually finish. Thus I've accepted the challenge of making interiors for the three starter ships.

Here's what I have with the Wolfen so far, mostly to show off the scale of the ship to its pilot. I'll get closer shots as I get some more real detail in there.

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/560/wolfen2eng.jpg

Random progress pics:
May 21 - http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/7536 ... wolfen.png
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/8207/c ... ailing.png
And one with a pilgrim for scale: http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/1733 ... old000.jpg

June 11 - Device slots! http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/5843 ... evices.png

[shanejfilomena]

I do not see a holder for my cup .
plenty of leg room tho

[Cirevam]

Cupholders? I've got something better: hamster bottles!

http://cirevam.deviantart.com/art/Wolfe ... -298822806

After a lengthy discussion on IRC I figured out a good design for the Wolfen. I want to thank everyone who was there while discussing the dry weight of ships, how much space a tonne of water takes up, why the bridge on the Enterprise has too much empty space except for one instance, and more.

[sdw195]

1 cubic cm of water has a mass of 1 gram and a volume of 1 ml
there for, 1 ton of water will take up an ares of 1 cubic meter and have a volume of 1000 liters,
this is at 5°c I think,

at least thats what I remember from school, ( its late and I tired )

don't you just love the metric system,

[Amariithynar]

1 cc is 0.9167 g, and there are 1 million ccs in a cubic metre. Thus, a cubic metre of water ice (because it does specify ice) is actually only 916.7 kg. to get 1 ton of water ice, the volume will be larger.

[Cirevam]

Maybe the container that holds the water ice makes up the other ~80 kg. In total it's still bigger than a cubic meter, but then it's not actually a ton of water ice... the net weight of the entire package would be a ton. As for volume...

[22:17] <+Amariithynar> 8.33% bigger.
[22:17] <+Amariithynar> ...if I did my maths right.

[Cirevam]

I've made progress:

http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/1889 ... orplan.png

I allocated space and movement paths for the entire ship, and it's bigger than before. Amar doesn't think it's big enough, but I get the feeling that he has a "bigger is better" mindset. I want opinions from more than one person, so please tell me what you think. I want to stick with this scale but if enough people say "geez, are you stupid? Change this thing, it's way wrong" then I'll of course change things (before you point out the missing third engine please note that this is the Wolfen Lite, a variant I made that has space for a docking port). I'd really like a word from George since he of all people should know how big or small these ships are, but fan speculation works too.

I'll be working on interior details soon so I can get pictures of every part of the ship. Even if no one wants to use this for dockscreen images I'll still be using the interiors for a Transcendence comic I'm starting to write. It's going to take forever just to get started because of all the people I'll have to make.

Finally, here are a couple perspective shots so you can get a clue about how tall things are.
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/1917 ... rfront.png
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3635/wol ... orrear.png

[RPC]

It doesn't seem wrong to me. I actually like that plan. However, I haven't been on a yacht or any seafaring ship so there is that.

[Amariithynar]

I'm not of a bigger is better mindset. ;P I've just lived in some fairly small places (including one nicknamed "The Coffin", for a reason) and the dimensions have seemed smaller than what anyone who has a ship as their only living space would use. If it was a larger military ship with a giant crew, I could see crew quarters being akin to a submarine, but as is they're potentially multi-crew ships with a single crewmember. I know I've brought it up a lot on the IRC, but the YT-1300 series matches the cargo capacity of a wolfen quite well, and it has reasonably more space than the Wolfen mockup you originally did.

Anyways, going over the most current images, these are my opinions:

1) Cargo hold should extend all the way to the outer hull, at least at the entrance. It'd have to be fairly wide, too, though how tall, not entirely sure- since we don't have dimensions for anything, we don't know what a Massive Tharsis Plate's size is, same with an APA, or a Worldplate. since we can't, I'd assume it's basically a big, hollow blister inside the ship, with just minimal hull and, of course, armor plating over that.

2) The engine rooms' space should encapsulate the engines themselves, as well, as you need to be able to access them without a spacesuit from the inside. Not something like Star Trek where the Warp Core is wide open, and you can access it from any angle and multiple stories, but something more like the Jeffries Tubes- Cramped, narrow crawlspaces meant for doing manual repairs on the fly. Also, would the two engine rooms be like a sub's engine rooms, separate encapsulations so if one goes it doesn't hit the other? If not, could the area be given over to other rooms and a single main engine room (with crew access hatches in the current engine rooms) be put in instead?

3) There seems to be a lot of "wasted" space outside the engines. What is it used for? I could see two more rooms potentially in those locations, though they would be by necessity rather cramped, due to the hull shape. Not sure what use- perhaps secondary/tertiary passenger quarters, or personal hold space or something.

4) I'd widen the living quarters, and have the corridor between the two areas currently designated as such also converted into living quarters space- and then door off the entrance to the cockpit and the entrance to the living quarters, giving a 3x3(x3?) meter room. Detailed like a camper/winnebago style, everything could fold away and/or have several functions, thus increasing QoL while also remaining rather functional.

5) (addition on 2) By generator room, you mean the engine, right? Couldn't that be the engine room, with the Jeffries Tubes allowing access to the engines manually for repairs et al, rather than two separate ones?

6) You said you removed an engine for a docking port. Couldn't you just hook up your cargo hold to a docking port on the station and access that way? since you need to move cargo around anyways. Or, more likely for the larger stations, just fly in with the smaller craft and land in docking bays (though this isn't shown, the fact Starton Eridani has something like 1.5 million inhabitants lends credence to the concept that they'd have proper docking bays, not just docking ports. Number of residents calculated by SolarDragon, remembered (either correctly or wrongly) by me ).

[Cirevam]

1) Cargo hold should extend all the way to the outer hull, at least at the entrance. It'd have to be fairly wide, too, though how tall, not entirely sure- since we don't have dimensions for anything, we don't know what a Massive Tharsis Plate's size is, same with an APA, or a Worldplate. since we can't, I'd assume it's basically a big, hollow blister inside the ship, with just minimal hull and, of course, armor plating over that.

2) The engine rooms' space should encapsulate the engines themselves, as well, as you need to be able to access them without a spacesuit from the inside. Not something like Star Trek where the Warp Core is wide open, and you can access it from any angle and multiple stories, but something more like the Jeffries Tubes- Cramped, narrow crawlspaces meant for doing manual repairs on the fly. Also, would the two engine rooms be like a sub's engine rooms, separate encapsulations so if one goes it doesn't hit the other? If not, could the area be given over to other rooms and a single main engine room (with crew access hatches in the current engine rooms) be put in instead?

3) There seems to be a lot of "wasted" space outside the engines. What is it used for? I could see two more rooms potentially in those locations, though they would be by necessity rather cramped, due to the hull shape.

4) I'd widen the living quarters, and have the corridor between the two areas currently designated as such also converted into living quarters space- and then door off the entrance to the cockpit and the entrance to the living quarters, giving a 3x3(x3?) meter room. Detailed like a camper/winnebago style, everything could fold away and/or have several functions, thus increasing QoL while also remaining rather functional.

5) (addition on 2) By generator room, you mean the engine, right? Couldn't that be the engine room, with the Jeffries Tubes allowing access to the engines manually for repairs et al, rather than two separate ones?

6) You said you removed an engine for a docking port. Couldn't you just hook up your cargo hold to a docking port on the station and access that way? since you need to move cargo around anyways. Or, more likely for the larger stations, just fly in with the smaller craft and land in docking bays.

1) I'm not sure which entrance you're talking about, because as I have it now, the docking port is the entrance. It's a tube that extends from the ship and opens up along the side so you can directly access the hold from there. If you mean the rear flat part of the ship is the entrance, then... well, those heatsinks/fins are mostly in the way, but that would be the optimal place. I'll see what I can do, but I'll definitely extend the hold to the rear at the very least. As for armour size being an issue, because armour can fit any ship I'm going to say it contains nanomachines that can change the shape of the plate, allowing it to fold up. It's a very handwavey explanation but there aren't very many other options.

2) The engines themselves are not completely within the ship's hull, as in the very frontmost parts that are covered by hull on top are not covered on the bottom. You can only access the top front half from inside the ship but they're so close to the top hull that there's barely any room to fit a Jeffries tube. There's room along the front so I'll see what I can fit there. And yes, the two rooms are separate in case one engine is disabled or damaged.

3) Outside like towards the weapons pylons? My guess was heavy-gauge wiring to send power to the weapons plus fuel lines that run to the retrorockets (the little black nubs all over the ship).

4) This is a really good idea. Really good. I'm going to do this.

5) I did mean generator but I thought about it a little more and considered that it could be a non-weapons device room. But it's too small to hold both a generator and a shield while retaining enough free space to move about. One thing I didn't notice until I looked just now is that this room is taller than the hallways, so there is enough space to put Jeffries tubes that leads to the engines from that room. They would go over the galley and WC and lead right to the middle part of each engine. I think having the generator on the floor and access tubes to the engines on top would work well.

6) Remember that ships can dock with other ships or wrecks, so I felt the need for a docking port of some kind, even if it wasn't compatible with everything else. It's more like an airlock that can extend outside of the ship. But for stations, the ships should definitely just fly in. It doesn't make sense to leave them floating out there, even though they do in-game.

[digdug]

I absolutely love this thread !

The docking port, could it be placed under the ship ?

[Cirevam]

Docking port: http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/5262 ... ngport.png

The port will open up like a camera aperture and the white cylinder thing slides out of that, which can open on the bottom and on the side. It will make more sense when that bit gets modeled. You can also see from that pic that I'm figuring out how to mount a smaller third engine to get the design closer to canon. It just takes up so much space no matter how big the ship is, and the decision to remove it initially was to get access to that docking port. If it were up to me I'd leave out the middle engine entirely, but some people have said that it should stay, so I'm trying to meet them halfway.

I also started a bit on the EI500: http://img805.imageshack.us/img805/4403 ... layout.png

The freighter is a mansion compared to the Wolfen and Sapphire. You could almost put one of those ships in the freighter's cargo hold. A Zulu or Hammerhead could definitely fit.

[Cirevam]

I'm trying to figure out good door designs for each room but I need some input. You can see two designs I already have here. I need both a full sliding door and a two-piece door because there's not enough room for certain door designs in some doorways. Example: the engine rooms are right next to the galley and WC, so a two-piece door would slide into those rooms because they're so close, which is bad. I'm already going to have to cheat a little with the cargo hold doors since I kinda crammed the doorways in, but I think I can make them a little bit thinner since they're just the doorways from the cargo hold into the hallways. You can see them on the sides here.

Also, here's what our cargo holds look like when we're using launchers: http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9950 ... ssiles.png

[RPC]

Well, if you want to be cheap you could have "energy shield doors" that is basically blue light and handwave it

[Atarlost]

I'd do either swing out hatches or no door. You don't need privacy on a one man scout ship so the only reason to have a door is as a pressure barrier or to keep floating liquids in the head or kitchen, which call for something air tight or water tight respectively.